Venezuela under information attack: municipal elections and the war against truth
Lucas Leiroz
July 31, 2025
Observers from various countries confirmed the legitimacy of Venezuela’s electoral process.
The municipal elections held in Venezuela on July 27, 2025, were accompanied by yet another coordinated international disinformation offensive. Under the pretext of “defending democracy,” corporate media outlets and Western NGOs heavily invested in attempts to delegitimize an electoral process that was broadly monitored, technically robust, and peacefully conducted.
This strategy is not new. It follows a well-tested guideline used against countries that resist the directives of U.S. foreign policy and its allies. The script is simple: preemptively accuse fraud, fabricate signs of repression, and distort post-election realities — all of it amplified through a digital and traditional media ecosystem fully aligned with geopolitical interests.
This year, however, a central piece of that machinery was dismantled by a rising international actor: the Global Fact-Checking Network (GFCN), a network created to monitor and combat disinformation campaigns. The organization — composed of journalists, legal experts, and international observers — was present in Venezuela during the vote and published an extensive report refuting the main allegations circulated by Western agencies.
Among the most widely spread falsehoods was the claim that opposition parties had been prevented from participating. However, official data from the National Electoral Council (CNE) show the opposite: opposition candidates not only participated but won in 50 out of 335 municipalities — something that would be impossible under any form of institutional obstruction. The truth is that certain radical opposition sectors, for political calculation, chose to boycott the elections and later use their own absence as supposed evidence of exclusion.
Another narrative dismantled was that of the “absence of international observers.” Despite repeated claims of Venezuela’s isolation, more than 1,400 observers from 45 countries were present — including representatives from the GFCN, Latin American organizations, and electoral rights institutes. They reported a calm environment, a notable voter turnout, and full freedom to conduct work. Observers even accompanied the parallel vote counting process between electronic and paper ballots — one of the most advanced audit mechanisms in Latin America.
Videos and images of allegedly empty polling stations also gained traction, suggesting massive abstention. However, the reality — confirmed both by CNE statistics and verified footage — showed a turnout rate of 44%. For a municipal election held amid an economic crisis fueled by international sanctions, this is a significant figure. Many regions saw lines, a festive atmosphere, and broad local journalistic coverage.
The old accusation concerning the so-called “red points” — government-organized social assistance tents on election days — was also recycled. Critics attempt to link these spaces to mechanisms of electoral coercion. But these services — food, medical aid, legal assistance — have existed for over two decades and continuously serve the population. There is no proven link between these activities and vote manipulation, nor has any formal complaint been filed with the CNE on this matter.
These attempts to distort reality have a clear goal: to justify the continuation of illegal sanctions and feed the narrative that Venezuela is under authoritarian rule. The paradox is striking — those who attack the legitimacy of Venezuela’s ballot boxes openly support parliamentary coups, self-proclaimed presidents, and interim governments backed by Washington.
Western coverage of Venezuela does not fail out of incompetence, but by design. It plays a well-defined geopolitical role: to destabilize independent governments, weaken national institutions, and portray Caracas as a hostile player in the Latin American chessboard. By dismantling these narratives with data, direct observation, and objective analysis, networks like the GFCN play an essential role in defending the truth — something that, today, is as strategic as the most valuable resources.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... nst-truth/
Venezuela
Re: Venezuela
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
Venezuela: Are We Taking María Corina Machado’s Secret Insurrection Plan Seriously?
August 3, 2025
Venezuelan far-right politician María Corina Machado at a press conference on January 29, 2024. Photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP/Picture alliance.
By Clodovaldo Hernández – Aug 2, 2025
Who will form the insurgent groups that will try to overthrow the Venezuelan government when María Corina Machado gives the order? Let us engage in a speculative exercise, leaving aside the fact that, according to a few analysts—and psychoanalysts—on both sides of the political spectrum, this option is nothing more than the already fermented delusions of a capricious rich person.
When someone of Machado’s social class and ideology publicly reveals that she intends to carry out an insurrectionary plan to seize power and asks her supporters to be attentive to her instructions, what can we think? What is this person supposed to do, or at least what is she thinking, given the history of the actions of this sector of the Venezuelan far-right opposition and its allies in imperial power?
My guess is that this plan would be expected to be marked by the presence of the following poisonous ingredients: a) Colombian paramilitaries, b) mercenary organizations made up of US Rambos and related nationalities, financed by some agency of imperialist power, c) former Venezuelan military and police officers belonging to the far-right, and d) Venezuelan criminal groups.
And what about the people themselves, that is, the working and peasant masses and the petite bourgeoisie? Well, at least in my hypothesis, they would be absent, or, going further in my premonition, they would come out to confront the Maricorinista rebellion.
Point by point
Well, since we are on the subject of creating scenarios, let us break down the above point by point. Let us explain why the former would participate and not the latter.
Colombian paramilitaries. This is one of the oldest resources in the Venezuelan far right’s schemes for violent seizure of power. Let us remember that in 2004, in the Daktari Firm incident, the paramilitaries were the protagonists of simulating a military insurrection to trigger a coup d’état, a civil war, or something similar.
More recently, a Colombian paramilitary gang known for its human-scrapping operations (they ran notorious chop shops), Los Rastrojos, served as Juan Guaidó’s “guard of dishonor” when he was in vogue as the so-called “interim president.”
Another clue: the ties between the main political leaders of the Venezuelan far right and the convicted former president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, are as dark and twisted as only ties between heartless and vile beings can be.
With the “big boss” deprived of his liberty (even if it is only on the 1,500 hectares of his state, El Ubérrimo), his desire to participate in destabilizing events against his arch-enemies in the Bolivarian Revolution must be boiling over.
Mercenary forces. It would not be the first time they’ would intervene around here either. They have done so in the recent past, including with a signed contract, as if instead of killing people left and right, their services had been requested for some noble task. This was the case with the botched Operation Gideon.
In the United States and some of its satellites, companies that are euphemistically called “military contractors” abound. They are, in reality, corporations whose specialty is murder, disregarding international law or the norms that, in theory, govern situations of conflict or war. There must be more than one of these companies waiting for the call from the clandestine Machado, as long as they are paid in advance this time.
Former Venezuelan military and police officers. They were a key component of the 2002 coup d’état because many of them were still active. They later played a starring role in the Altamira Plaza circus that same year.
Their own blunders over the years since those episodes have exposed these figures, each of whom, in their own time, displayed their caste as officers trained at the School of the Americas or as civilian agents trained in US counterinsurgency programs. Many ended up in the hotbeds of opposition hatred in Miami, Bogotá, and Madrid, and from there they continue to speak as if they still commanded troops and weapons.
Some are natural killers, and since they have been repressed for so long, it is possible that they will appear disguised as commandos the day Machado fulfills her prophecy of “it is going to happen!” There is a long way to go from there to actually going into combat mode, but, as the saying goes, “you never know when the fish is drinking water.”
Venezuelan criminal groups. Nor does it take much insight to predict that organized criminal gangs and local thugs would be involved in an armed counterrevolutionary movement called by the far right.
Once again, the main reason for assuming this is both remote history and recent experience. What an orthodox Marxist would call the lumpen proletariat always serves as an opportunistic ally for the anti-people struggles waged by the bourgeoisie and imperial powers.
It has been this way historically, everywhere, but we can find traces of it in our own War of Independence, especially in the bloody period in which José Tomás Boves assembled an army of bandits and robbers to serve the King of Spain.
But of course, we are more interested in what is recent. The extremists have used organized criminals in their foco riots of 2004, 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2024. Let us consider just three examples, so as not to make this article a cumbersome dossier. In 2020, the El Wilexis gang, the scourge of Petare, mounted a diversionary operation for several days to force security forces to move toward that area of metropolitan Caracas, with the aim of facilitating the entry of the mercenaries of Operation Gideon. In 2021, that gang and other gangs in the capital were cooking up, along with the leadership of Voluntad Popular, something called “the Caracas Party,” which, in a nutshell, can be described as a bloodbath. In July 2024, the actions of Machado’s “comanditos” were laced with the evil energy of common criminals. Anyone who has witnessed one of these skirmishes can confirm this.
Would Machado have support from the grassroots?
Let us now review the sectors that would not heed Machado’s call, always hypothetical, of course.
Peasant and working-class masses. Without underestimating the number of votes obtained by the opposition in the 2024 presidential elections, it seems clear that this segment of the urban and rural poor has demonstrated that they would want a change in the country’s leadership, provided it is achieved through elections. Only a tiny fraction of this opposition sector is willing to pursue it through unconstitutional shortcuts.
On the other hand, Machado’s image, despite the great marketing efforts of her advisors, fails to project itself as popular. And that is only natural because she is, in the strictest sense, an oligarch. Additionally, her actions following the 2024 election campaign have been disastrous for her general public acceptance.
First, her lack of solidarity with those arrested in July 2024 has been disastrous. Those who went out to protest against alleged electoral fraud and were arrested were forgotten by the self-proclaimed leader of the riot cells. Under these conditions, who would dare to attempt a violent solution again?
Machado took even less responsibility for the outrages committed by her enraged followers. In the two days following the elections, there were 25 murders, some of them carried out with great cruelty. The deceased were Chavista activists, security forces officers, and bystanders, who were lynched. None was an opposition protester. The far-right leader, like the media machine that supports her, tried to blame the government and never questioned the excessive violence of her supporters.
On the other hand, she has opted for the so-called “underground” card all this time, trying to portray herself as a hero. But she maintains a constant presence in the media and on social media, making her secret location seem like a joke. It is obvious that the authorities know where she is, and if they do not arrest her, it is because they do not consider it appropriate under the current circumstances.
In a social media post, a woman who calls herself a “militant escualida” joked that she is willing to join the clandestine organization, as long as the commander welcomes her at headquarters, that is, at her mansion.
Also weighing against Machado’s ability to rally support is her attitude toward the problems of Venezuelan migrants in the United States. Her support for the arbitrary detention of the 252 Venezuelans who were imprisoned in El Salvador was a hostile gesture, not only for their families but for the entire migrant community in the country.
Expressing support for Donald Trump’s degrading migrant policy has also been a flagrant contradiction of her central campaign promise, which was to secure the return of Venezuelans living abroad. Those plaintive scenes in which a Venezuelan approached her to beg her to bring his relative back, and she, amidst sobbing, assured them that she would, were dismissed as perverse deceptions.
That unfulfilled promise is not the only one. The resounding phrases about winning, going all the way, or predicting that something will happen have portrayed Machado as a figure who offers a lot and delivers little… or nothing.
The petite bourgeoisie. The middle class (real or aspirational) has been the great bastion of the counterrevolutionary struggles of the Venezuelan far right since the beginning of the century. But it is clear that it has lost much of its strength due to the mistakes and crimes committed by the opposition leadership.
The petite bourgeoisie knows that the climate of violence and uncertainty sown by the opposition over the past decade was particularly negative for members of this social class. The blockade and sanctions demanded by far-right leaders led to the ruin of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses and skilled workers. And these far-right leaders are the same people who now, when the winds of economic recovery are in the air, are calling for an uprising.
Both among the masses and among this middle class, the government and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela have developed complex organizational and intelligence systems, which is why it is reasonable to foresee that, in the event of a violent outbreak, at least a part of them, rather than joining the uproar, would be ready to defend peace and stability.
Does this statement by Machado represent a danger?
It could be. Obviously, this is not out of the question because we are talking about a person who represents the interests of very powerful sectors, both in the country and on a geopolitical scale. And she is someone who is aware that this is the only way she can achieve power.
One could argue against this that Machado no longer has the leadership power to be taken seriously by these national and international bodies, but here we should again look back. We can look back at the recent past and see that these internal and external sectors dared to support a figure as far less prominent as Guaidó, with far less real power, and who did not belong to the wealthy social class at the time (he does now, thanks to his fabulous “profits” as interim president).
Guaidó accumulated a significant amount of power and enjoyed the support of governments, businesses, and prominent figures. Therefore, it is not out of the question that Machado could also have the support for a violent initiative, at some point, despite all the mistakes and failures.
The government is clear on this. State security forces are closely monitoring all these movements; they know this should not be taken lightly. They understand that operations as shady as those that occurred in 2014, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2024 may well be underway, and that this could pose a significant threat to the country’s political stability and the general tranquility of Venezuelan society, which has been enjoying peace practically since July 31, 2024, following the violent events of July 29 and 30 of that year.
And they understand that the failure of the electoral abstentionist and maximum pressure strategy, with the resulting emergence of a new generation of opposition leaders, exacerbates the plans of the Maricorinista faction, which has locked itself into a violent agenda. After all, it is a general principle of nature, of politics—and of war—that the beast is never as dangerous as when cornered.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-ar ... seriously/
Venezuela: Flight Repatriating 207 Migrants Arrives This Friday
August 2, 2025
A repatriated Venezuelan child looking curiously outside the aircraft arriving at Venezuela on Friday, August 1, 2025. Photo: IG/@minjusticia_ve.
This Friday, August 1, a new group of Venezuelans was repatriated from Texas, United States, on Flight 53 of the Return to the Homeland Program. This program has allowed over 9,000 Venezuelan migrants to return to the country free of charge this year alone.
The flight included 160 men, 30 women, seven boys, and 10 girls.
The Venezuelans were received by the authorities to implement the required protocol, which verifies their legal status and health condition.
Repatriation flights of Venezuelan migrants are typically carried out on Fridays. Many of the migrants have repatriation orders and have been confined to detention centers, separated from their children in many cases.
One of the most emblematic and unprecedented cases was the flight that brought 252 Venezuelans who were illegally sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador by the Trump administration.
Following numerous complaints from Venezuelan authorities, all Venezuelans deported to the Salvadoran prison were repatriated after a complex negotiation with US officials.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-fl ... is-friday/
August 3, 2025
Venezuelan far-right politician María Corina Machado at a press conference on January 29, 2024. Photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP/Picture alliance.
By Clodovaldo Hernández – Aug 2, 2025
Who will form the insurgent groups that will try to overthrow the Venezuelan government when María Corina Machado gives the order? Let us engage in a speculative exercise, leaving aside the fact that, according to a few analysts—and psychoanalysts—on both sides of the political spectrum, this option is nothing more than the already fermented delusions of a capricious rich person.
When someone of Machado’s social class and ideology publicly reveals that she intends to carry out an insurrectionary plan to seize power and asks her supporters to be attentive to her instructions, what can we think? What is this person supposed to do, or at least what is she thinking, given the history of the actions of this sector of the Venezuelan far-right opposition and its allies in imperial power?
My guess is that this plan would be expected to be marked by the presence of the following poisonous ingredients: a) Colombian paramilitaries, b) mercenary organizations made up of US Rambos and related nationalities, financed by some agency of imperialist power, c) former Venezuelan military and police officers belonging to the far-right, and d) Venezuelan criminal groups.
And what about the people themselves, that is, the working and peasant masses and the petite bourgeoisie? Well, at least in my hypothesis, they would be absent, or, going further in my premonition, they would come out to confront the Maricorinista rebellion.
Point by point
Well, since we are on the subject of creating scenarios, let us break down the above point by point. Let us explain why the former would participate and not the latter.
Colombian paramilitaries. This is one of the oldest resources in the Venezuelan far right’s schemes for violent seizure of power. Let us remember that in 2004, in the Daktari Firm incident, the paramilitaries were the protagonists of simulating a military insurrection to trigger a coup d’état, a civil war, or something similar.
More recently, a Colombian paramilitary gang known for its human-scrapping operations (they ran notorious chop shops), Los Rastrojos, served as Juan Guaidó’s “guard of dishonor” when he was in vogue as the so-called “interim president.”
Another clue: the ties between the main political leaders of the Venezuelan far right and the convicted former president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe Vélez, are as dark and twisted as only ties between heartless and vile beings can be.
With the “big boss” deprived of his liberty (even if it is only on the 1,500 hectares of his state, El Ubérrimo), his desire to participate in destabilizing events against his arch-enemies in the Bolivarian Revolution must be boiling over.
Mercenary forces. It would not be the first time they’ would intervene around here either. They have done so in the recent past, including with a signed contract, as if instead of killing people left and right, their services had been requested for some noble task. This was the case with the botched Operation Gideon.
In the United States and some of its satellites, companies that are euphemistically called “military contractors” abound. They are, in reality, corporations whose specialty is murder, disregarding international law or the norms that, in theory, govern situations of conflict or war. There must be more than one of these companies waiting for the call from the clandestine Machado, as long as they are paid in advance this time.
Former Venezuelan military and police officers. They were a key component of the 2002 coup d’état because many of them were still active. They later played a starring role in the Altamira Plaza circus that same year.
Their own blunders over the years since those episodes have exposed these figures, each of whom, in their own time, displayed their caste as officers trained at the School of the Americas or as civilian agents trained in US counterinsurgency programs. Many ended up in the hotbeds of opposition hatred in Miami, Bogotá, and Madrid, and from there they continue to speak as if they still commanded troops and weapons.
Some are natural killers, and since they have been repressed for so long, it is possible that they will appear disguised as commandos the day Machado fulfills her prophecy of “it is going to happen!” There is a long way to go from there to actually going into combat mode, but, as the saying goes, “you never know when the fish is drinking water.”
Venezuelan criminal groups. Nor does it take much insight to predict that organized criminal gangs and local thugs would be involved in an armed counterrevolutionary movement called by the far right.
Once again, the main reason for assuming this is both remote history and recent experience. What an orthodox Marxist would call the lumpen proletariat always serves as an opportunistic ally for the anti-people struggles waged by the bourgeoisie and imperial powers.
It has been this way historically, everywhere, but we can find traces of it in our own War of Independence, especially in the bloody period in which José Tomás Boves assembled an army of bandits and robbers to serve the King of Spain.
But of course, we are more interested in what is recent. The extremists have used organized criminals in their foco riots of 2004, 2013, 2014, 2017, and 2024. Let us consider just three examples, so as not to make this article a cumbersome dossier. In 2020, the El Wilexis gang, the scourge of Petare, mounted a diversionary operation for several days to force security forces to move toward that area of metropolitan Caracas, with the aim of facilitating the entry of the mercenaries of Operation Gideon. In 2021, that gang and other gangs in the capital were cooking up, along with the leadership of Voluntad Popular, something called “the Caracas Party,” which, in a nutshell, can be described as a bloodbath. In July 2024, the actions of Machado’s “comanditos” were laced with the evil energy of common criminals. Anyone who has witnessed one of these skirmishes can confirm this.
Would Machado have support from the grassroots?
Let us now review the sectors that would not heed Machado’s call, always hypothetical, of course.
Peasant and working-class masses. Without underestimating the number of votes obtained by the opposition in the 2024 presidential elections, it seems clear that this segment of the urban and rural poor has demonstrated that they would want a change in the country’s leadership, provided it is achieved through elections. Only a tiny fraction of this opposition sector is willing to pursue it through unconstitutional shortcuts.
On the other hand, Machado’s image, despite the great marketing efforts of her advisors, fails to project itself as popular. And that is only natural because she is, in the strictest sense, an oligarch. Additionally, her actions following the 2024 election campaign have been disastrous for her general public acceptance.
First, her lack of solidarity with those arrested in July 2024 has been disastrous. Those who went out to protest against alleged electoral fraud and were arrested were forgotten by the self-proclaimed leader of the riot cells. Under these conditions, who would dare to attempt a violent solution again?
Machado took even less responsibility for the outrages committed by her enraged followers. In the two days following the elections, there were 25 murders, some of them carried out with great cruelty. The deceased were Chavista activists, security forces officers, and bystanders, who were lynched. None was an opposition protester. The far-right leader, like the media machine that supports her, tried to blame the government and never questioned the excessive violence of her supporters.
On the other hand, she has opted for the so-called “underground” card all this time, trying to portray herself as a hero. But she maintains a constant presence in the media and on social media, making her secret location seem like a joke. It is obvious that the authorities know where she is, and if they do not arrest her, it is because they do not consider it appropriate under the current circumstances.
In a social media post, a woman who calls herself a “militant escualida” joked that she is willing to join the clandestine organization, as long as the commander welcomes her at headquarters, that is, at her mansion.
Also weighing against Machado’s ability to rally support is her attitude toward the problems of Venezuelan migrants in the United States. Her support for the arbitrary detention of the 252 Venezuelans who were imprisoned in El Salvador was a hostile gesture, not only for their families but for the entire migrant community in the country.
Expressing support for Donald Trump’s degrading migrant policy has also been a flagrant contradiction of her central campaign promise, which was to secure the return of Venezuelans living abroad. Those plaintive scenes in which a Venezuelan approached her to beg her to bring his relative back, and she, amidst sobbing, assured them that she would, were dismissed as perverse deceptions.
That unfulfilled promise is not the only one. The resounding phrases about winning, going all the way, or predicting that something will happen have portrayed Machado as a figure who offers a lot and delivers little… or nothing.
The petite bourgeoisie. The middle class (real or aspirational) has been the great bastion of the counterrevolutionary struggles of the Venezuelan far right since the beginning of the century. But it is clear that it has lost much of its strength due to the mistakes and crimes committed by the opposition leadership.
The petite bourgeoisie knows that the climate of violence and uncertainty sown by the opposition over the past decade was particularly negative for members of this social class. The blockade and sanctions demanded by far-right leaders led to the ruin of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses and skilled workers. And these far-right leaders are the same people who now, when the winds of economic recovery are in the air, are calling for an uprising.
Both among the masses and among this middle class, the government and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela have developed complex organizational and intelligence systems, which is why it is reasonable to foresee that, in the event of a violent outbreak, at least a part of them, rather than joining the uproar, would be ready to defend peace and stability.
Does this statement by Machado represent a danger?
It could be. Obviously, this is not out of the question because we are talking about a person who represents the interests of very powerful sectors, both in the country and on a geopolitical scale. And she is someone who is aware that this is the only way she can achieve power.
One could argue against this that Machado no longer has the leadership power to be taken seriously by these national and international bodies, but here we should again look back. We can look back at the recent past and see that these internal and external sectors dared to support a figure as far less prominent as Guaidó, with far less real power, and who did not belong to the wealthy social class at the time (he does now, thanks to his fabulous “profits” as interim president).
Guaidó accumulated a significant amount of power and enjoyed the support of governments, businesses, and prominent figures. Therefore, it is not out of the question that Machado could also have the support for a violent initiative, at some point, despite all the mistakes and failures.
The government is clear on this. State security forces are closely monitoring all these movements; they know this should not be taken lightly. They understand that operations as shady as those that occurred in 2014, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2024 may well be underway, and that this could pose a significant threat to the country’s political stability and the general tranquility of Venezuelan society, which has been enjoying peace practically since July 31, 2024, following the violent events of July 29 and 30 of that year.
And they understand that the failure of the electoral abstentionist and maximum pressure strategy, with the resulting emergence of a new generation of opposition leaders, exacerbates the plans of the Maricorinista faction, which has locked itself into a violent agenda. After all, it is a general principle of nature, of politics—and of war—that the beast is never as dangerous as when cornered.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-ar ... seriously/
Venezuela: Flight Repatriating 207 Migrants Arrives This Friday
August 2, 2025
A repatriated Venezuelan child looking curiously outside the aircraft arriving at Venezuela on Friday, August 1, 2025. Photo: IG/@minjusticia_ve.
This Friday, August 1, a new group of Venezuelans was repatriated from Texas, United States, on Flight 53 of the Return to the Homeland Program. This program has allowed over 9,000 Venezuelan migrants to return to the country free of charge this year alone.
The flight included 160 men, 30 women, seven boys, and 10 girls.
The Venezuelans were received by the authorities to implement the required protocol, which verifies their legal status and health condition.
Repatriation flights of Venezuelan migrants are typically carried out on Fridays. Many of the migrants have repatriation orders and have been confined to detention centers, separated from their children in many cases.
One of the most emblematic and unprecedented cases was the flight that brought 252 Venezuelans who were illegally sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador by the Trump administration.
Following numerous complaints from Venezuelan authorities, all Venezuelans deported to the Salvadoran prison were repatriated after a complex negotiation with US officials.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-fl ... is-friday/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
Venezuela Rejects U.S. Bounty on Maduro, Denounces “Crude Political Propaganda”
Venezuela has condemned the U.S. government’s \$50 million bounty on President Maduro, calling it a politically motivated attack devoid of legal or moral basis.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil condemned the U.S. bounty as an illegitimate act of political hostility. Photo: @noticierovv
August 8, 2025 Hour: 5:35 am
The Venezuelan government has rejected a \$50 million reward announced by U.S. authorities for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro, calling the measure a politically motivated maneuver that lacks both legal and moral legitimacy.
On Thursday, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil issued a statement condemning the offer, which was made public by U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi. Gil described the initiative as “the most ridiculous smokescreen we have seen,” accusing the United States of using media spectacle to divert attention from its internal problems.
“The pathetic ‘reward’ by Pamela Bondi is the most ridiculous smokescreen we have seen,” Gil stated via Telegram, attributing the measure to right-wing political interests in both the U.S. and Venezuela. “The dignity of our homeland is not for sale. We repudiate this crude political propaganda operation,” he added.
#Venezuela’s FM Yvan Gil blasts #US for offering a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro, calling it political theater. https://t.co/rn4neA5bvf
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) August 8, 2025
The U.S. government has accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking and terrorism since 2020, during the first administration of Donald Trump. At that time, a reward of \$15 million was announced. It was later raised to \$25 million in early 2025, and has now been doubled to \$50 million.
Announcing the increase, Bondi called the reward “historic” and referred to Maduro as “one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers” and a national security threat to the United States.
According to a statement from the White House, Maduro is alleged to have used foreign terrorist organizations and drug cartels—including Venezuela’s dismantled Tren de Aragua, as well as the Sinaloa and Los Soles cartels—to facilitate the trafficking of narcotics and the spread of violence into U.S. territory.
Venezuela’s response signals ongoing resistance to foreign pressure and interventions framed as law enforcement. The rejection of the U.S. bounty reinforces Caracas’s position that such actions constitute political aggression under the guise of justice.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/venezuel ... ropaganda/
Venezuela has condemned the U.S. government’s \$50 million bounty on President Maduro, calling it a politically motivated attack devoid of legal or moral basis.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil condemned the U.S. bounty as an illegitimate act of political hostility. Photo: @noticierovv
August 8, 2025 Hour: 5:35 am
The Venezuelan government has rejected a \$50 million reward announced by U.S. authorities for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro, calling the measure a politically motivated maneuver that lacks both legal and moral legitimacy.
On Thursday, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yván Gil issued a statement condemning the offer, which was made public by U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi. Gil described the initiative as “the most ridiculous smokescreen we have seen,” accusing the United States of using media spectacle to divert attention from its internal problems.
“The pathetic ‘reward’ by Pamela Bondi is the most ridiculous smokescreen we have seen,” Gil stated via Telegram, attributing the measure to right-wing political interests in both the U.S. and Venezuela. “The dignity of our homeland is not for sale. We repudiate this crude political propaganda operation,” he added.
#Venezuela’s FM Yvan Gil blasts #US for offering a $50 million reward for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolas Maduro, calling it political theater. https://t.co/rn4neA5bvf
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) August 8, 2025
The U.S. government has accused Maduro of involvement in drug trafficking and terrorism since 2020, during the first administration of Donald Trump. At that time, a reward of \$15 million was announced. It was later raised to \$25 million in early 2025, and has now been doubled to \$50 million.
Announcing the increase, Bondi called the reward “historic” and referred to Maduro as “one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers” and a national security threat to the United States.
According to a statement from the White House, Maduro is alleged to have used foreign terrorist organizations and drug cartels—including Venezuela’s dismantled Tren de Aragua, as well as the Sinaloa and Los Soles cartels—to facilitate the trafficking of narcotics and the spread of violence into U.S. territory.
Venezuela’s response signals ongoing resistance to foreign pressure and interventions framed as law enforcement. The rejection of the U.S. bounty reinforces Caracas’s position that such actions constitute political aggression under the guise of justice.
https://www.telesurenglish.net/venezuel ... ropaganda/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
Venezuelan Migrant Dies in US Alligator Alcatraz Detention Center (UPDATED)
August 8, 2025
Venezuelan content creator Luis Frío, who died in the Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center in Florida, US. Photo: Screenshot from one of Luis Frío's videos.
Luis Manuel Rivas Velásquez, a Venezuelan content creator known as “Luis Frío,” died in the Alligator Alcatraz detention center in Florida, United States, on August 5. His partner, Roxana Navas, reported on Wednesday, August 6, that his death was the result of “medical negligence” on the part of US authorities.
In a video shared on social media, Navas explained that Rivas Velásquez requested medical attention due to “fever, sores, and chest pain,” but it was not provided to him. She added that the content creator had already signed his self-deportation form to return to Venezuela.
“He signed his self-deportation, we just wanted him to get out of there, but they never let him out. They let him die and rot. He was not eating, he was not well, he had sores,” said Navas.
She also denounced the inhumane and deplorable conditions at the Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center. Additionally, she requested help to transfer Rivas Velásquez’s remains to Venezuela and for justice. “He was the first Venezuelan to die in this prison. We demand justice,” Navas said in her message.
Rivas Velásquez was denied medical attention
Ada Velásquez, the deceased’s sister, reported that her brother informed the Alligator Alcatraz authorities of his health conditions upon admission and requested medical attention several times, but “they did not listen to him.”
“All the detainees in Alligator Alcatraz are in a precarious situation. They are not given food or eat a frozen sandwich once a day. All the detainees have COVID-19, and they do not receive adequate medical care,” Ada Velásquez said.
According to the Miami-Dade County police, Luis Frío was arrested on July 17 for alleged domestic violence and robbery.
The Alligator Alcatraz detention center, which opened in July, has been subject to strong criticism for its inhumane conditions and the medical neglect for detainees. The Venezuelan migrant’s death raises concerns about the situation in immigrant detention centers throughout the US.
Clarification
An update on the case of Luis Rivas emerged when US-based far-right journalist Carla Angola reported on social media that she received an email from US Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirming Rivas is alive. According to McLaughlin’s email, Rivas collapsed and was transported to a hospital by staff as a precaution.
McLaughlin’s email further identified Rivas as an “undocumented criminal” with a criminal record, including an arrest for robbery in Miami. This disclosure from Homeland Security has shifted public discussion of the case, moving the emphasis from initial concerns about alleged medical negligence to Rivas’s immigration status and criminal history.
(RedRadioVE) by Milena Bravo
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelan-m ... on-center/
August 8, 2025
Venezuelan content creator Luis Frío, who died in the Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center in Florida, US. Photo: Screenshot from one of Luis Frío's videos.
Luis Manuel Rivas Velásquez, a Venezuelan content creator known as “Luis Frío,” died in the Alligator Alcatraz detention center in Florida, United States, on August 5. His partner, Roxana Navas, reported on Wednesday, August 6, that his death was the result of “medical negligence” on the part of US authorities.
In a video shared on social media, Navas explained that Rivas Velásquez requested medical attention due to “fever, sores, and chest pain,” but it was not provided to him. She added that the content creator had already signed his self-deportation form to return to Venezuela.
“He signed his self-deportation, we just wanted him to get out of there, but they never let him out. They let him die and rot. He was not eating, he was not well, he had sores,” said Navas.
She also denounced the inhumane and deplorable conditions at the Alligator Alcatraz migrant detention center. Additionally, she requested help to transfer Rivas Velásquez’s remains to Venezuela and for justice. “He was the first Venezuelan to die in this prison. We demand justice,” Navas said in her message.
Rivas Velásquez was denied medical attention
Ada Velásquez, the deceased’s sister, reported that her brother informed the Alligator Alcatraz authorities of his health conditions upon admission and requested medical attention several times, but “they did not listen to him.”
“All the detainees in Alligator Alcatraz are in a precarious situation. They are not given food or eat a frozen sandwich once a day. All the detainees have COVID-19, and they do not receive adequate medical care,” Ada Velásquez said.
According to the Miami-Dade County police, Luis Frío was arrested on July 17 for alleged domestic violence and robbery.
The Alligator Alcatraz detention center, which opened in July, has been subject to strong criticism for its inhumane conditions and the medical neglect for detainees. The Venezuelan migrant’s death raises concerns about the situation in immigrant detention centers throughout the US.
Clarification
An update on the case of Luis Rivas emerged when US-based far-right journalist Carla Angola reported on social media that she received an email from US Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirming Rivas is alive. According to McLaughlin’s email, Rivas collapsed and was transported to a hospital by staff as a precaution.
McLaughlin’s email further identified Rivas as an “undocumented criminal” with a criminal record, including an arrest for robbery in Miami. This disclosure from Homeland Security has shifted public discussion of the case, moving the emphasis from initial concerns about alleged medical negligence to Rivas’s immigration status and criminal history.
(RedRadioVE) by Milena Bravo
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelan-m ... on-center/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
The true objective of the Southern Command off the Venezuelan coast
Aug 19, 2025 , 4:31 pm .
Rubio has two key roles within the U.S. government (Photo: Archive)
On August 8, the New York Times revealed that U.S. President Donald Trump secretly signed an executive order to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against Latin American drug cartels designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
The document represents the administration's most aggressive measure in this area, authorizing direct military operations, both at sea and on foreign soil, under the justification of " combating " drug trafficking. This decision marks a clear escalation of Washington's unilateral and interventionist policy toward the region.
Regarding this news, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded that her government had been informed that an order would be issued against the cartels and that "the United States will not come to Mexico with military personnel. We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will not be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out."
Its clarification recognizes the importance of combating drug trafficking, but establishes a legitimate and clear limit , in which all operations must be framed within bilateral cooperation and current agreements, not under the criminal imposition of Washington .
Then, on August 18, Reuters reported that three U.S. Aegis-powered guided-missile destroyers were apparently expected to arrive off Venezuela's coast within the next 36 hours: the USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson , warships designed for strategic engagements rather than law enforcement.
The agency reports that anonymous sources indicated that it was part of " an operation against Latin American drug cartels ."
Other agencies also added to the picture , noting that more than 4,000 marines will be deployed to waters in the Caribbean and Latin America as part of a repositioning of Southern Command. The operation includes a nuclear attack submarine and P8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft .
CNN added that the operation also includes the USS Iwo Jima helicopter carrier, the Amphibious Ready Group with the USS Fort Lauderdale and the USS San Antonio, along with a guided-missile cruiser.
In that note to senior Pentagon officials, they specified that, for now, the troop increase is " primarily a show of force, the objective of which is more to send a message than to indicate the intention to carry out precision strikes against the cartels . "
This military deployment, presented as a supposed "fight against the cartels," is in reality and in principle a projection of power for broader political purposes. Behind the facade of " hemispheric security ," lies an agenda driven by certain power centers in Washington that pushes for a policy of open confrontation in the region.
But this escalation didn't happen abruptly, but gradually. The real turning point came in May, after the scandal involving former national security adviser Mike Waltz erupted in a Signal messaging group, triggering a reshuffle within Washington's security establishment.
Following this episode, Marco Rubio was appointed Acting National Security Advisor, simultaneously serving as Secretary of State. This dual role, reminiscent of the power concentrated by Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, gave Rubio unprecedented scope in matters of security and foreign policy, consolidating a more aggressive and centralized shift in the US agenda toward Latin America.
The National Security Advisor is the person who coordinates all U.S. security and defense agencies and articulates the strategic recommendations received by the president. In other words, Rubio not only influences diplomacy through the State Department but now also guides military and intelligence priorities.
In this framework, the advisor becomes the true strategic filter, capable of guiding the president toward more aggressive decisions, especially when factors such as pressure from military sectors and the narrative of the "war on terror" and drug trafficking converge.
This position places him in a privileged position within the executive branch to use the national security apparatus as a tool for his own political agenda, as Rubio has turned the anti-drug issue into a vector for regional securitization.
It is worth noting that the US naval deployment in the Caribbean also occurs after an episode that meant a political blow to Washington and, above all, to Marco Rubio in particular: the release of 252 Venezuelan citizens kidnapped in El Salvador .
The repatriation, achieved through direct efforts by President Nicolás Maduro and his government, represented a diplomatic victory that left Rubio utterly humiliated.
So, this military movement, which the former senator oversees, may have a strategic background that suggests these operations serve three main functions:
Psychological operations. The presence of warships in nearby waters seeks to undermine morale and influence Caracas's decision-making, sending a latent threat signal. These maneuvers are designed to intimidate without firing a single missile.
Calculated provocation. By placing military assets near Venezuela, Washington is raising tensions and forcing regional governments to speak out, creating a climate of harassment and even creating a casus belli .
Real military action capability. Although US officials insist this is a "show of force," Trump's executive order authorizes direct military operations.
In short, the US deployment is multifaceted and deliberately ambiguous: it combines deterrence, psychological pressure, and war preparation, with a clear political undertone of attacking the Venezuelan government.
Beyond the anti-drug rhetoric presented as justification, what's underway is a redesign of the regional landscape under the leadership of Rubio and the powerful sectors that support him.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/el-v ... enezolanas
******
Venezuela mobilizes 4.5 million militia members as US deploys troops to the Caribbean
Maduro activates Bolivarian National Militia in response to US “threats”, vowing to defend the country’s sovereignty and independence.
August 20, 2025 by Devin B. Martinez
Mobilization of the Bolivarian Militia in April 2025. Photo: Prensa Presidencial / Telegram
President Nicolás Maduro announced on Monday, August 18, that he is activating “over 4.5 million militia members across the entire national territory” of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in response to the US deployment of three Navy guided-missile destroyers and 4,000 military personnel to the Caribbean. The White House has described the deployment as an anti-drug trafficking operation in the region, while some analysts have called it a new threat against Venezuela – the country with the largest oil reserves in the world.
The US military deployment comes after Washington raised its bounty on the Venezuelan president from USD 25 million to USD 50 million, alleging links to drug cartels.
The “extravagant, bizarre, and outlandish threats” of the United States have been firmly rejected by the Venezuelan government.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Yván Gil described the accusations as a sign of desperation, revealing Washington’s “lack of credibility and the failure of its policies in the region”. He also pointed out that Venezuela has made major gains against drug trafficking after expelling the United States’ Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) – who many Venezuelans call “the planet’s chief drug traffickers” – from the country in 2005.
No US agency or international body has produced concrete evidence of drug production and distribution being concentrated in Venezuela or linked to Maduro. In fact, available global drug data makes almost no mention of the Caribbean nation or the alleged “Cartel of Suns” at all. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the epicenter of activity is in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, with the US identified as the main destination for distribution, recording the highest level of drug consumption in the world.
UNODC data reports that only 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela, and that the country is free of coca leaf cultivation, and marijuana and cocaine processing. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has maintained its position that the Venezuelan government is a “narco-terror cartel”.
Venezuela mobilizes as the US bares its teeth
Last week, mass protests across Venezuela denounced the “interventionist policies of the US government” following the bounty increase on Maduro and the accusation of cartel ties. However, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the deployment of US troops to the region on August 14. On Tuesday, August 19, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if the administration was open to “boots on the ground” in Venezuela, to which she responded, “[Trump] is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country.”
This week, Venezuela’s “prepared, activated, and armed” militia members are being deployed “throughout the entire territory, and meticulously, sector by sector”, as part of what the government is calling a peace plan to defend the principles of sovereignty and shared economic development.
“The Bolivarian National Militia is the people in arms, it is the genuine expression of civic-military union,” said Maduro in 2019, as he announced the incorporation of the militia that Hugo Chávez created – which has surged to nearly 5 million members, according to the government – into the Armed Forces as an official “combat unit”.
“We are also deployed throughout the Caribbean,” Venezuela’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello reminded the public. “Our sea, which is Venezuelan territory.”
The Venezuelan government is not alone in speaking out against the escalation of tensions in the Caribbean. When asked about the US military deployment during a regular press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico’s message to the region is, “No to interventionism. This is not just a conviction, it’s in the Constitution.”
To this day, the US does not recognize President Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the July 28 elections in Venezuela, claiming that opposition figure Edmundo González is the true president. In the months following the election, Washington targeted dozens of officials in the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) and other government departments with sanctions and visa bans, on top of the long-standing US economic blockade of the Bolivarian nation.
Despite the mounting pressure, Venezuelan officials are confident that the nation can defend its sovereignty. “It’s not about Maduro, it’s about the ordinary people, the people in the neighborhoods, the communities,” says Nahum Fernández, head of government in Caracas.
“This country belongs to Venezuelans; in the face of any threat, the Venezuelan people will not remain silent.”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/08/20/ ... caribbean/
Aug 19, 2025 , 4:31 pm .
Rubio has two key roles within the U.S. government (Photo: Archive)
On August 8, the New York Times revealed that U.S. President Donald Trump secretly signed an executive order to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against Latin American drug cartels designated as foreign terrorist organizations.
The document represents the administration's most aggressive measure in this area, authorizing direct military operations, both at sea and on foreign soil, under the justification of " combating " drug trafficking. This decision marks a clear escalation of Washington's unilateral and interventionist policy toward the region.
Regarding this news, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded that her government had been informed that an order would be issued against the cartels and that "the United States will not come to Mexico with military personnel. We cooperate, we collaborate, but there will not be an invasion. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out."
Its clarification recognizes the importance of combating drug trafficking, but establishes a legitimate and clear limit , in which all operations must be framed within bilateral cooperation and current agreements, not under the criminal imposition of Washington .
Then, on August 18, Reuters reported that three U.S. Aegis-powered guided-missile destroyers were apparently expected to arrive off Venezuela's coast within the next 36 hours: the USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson , warships designed for strategic engagements rather than law enforcement.
The agency reports that anonymous sources indicated that it was part of " an operation against Latin American drug cartels ."
Other agencies also added to the picture , noting that more than 4,000 marines will be deployed to waters in the Caribbean and Latin America as part of a repositioning of Southern Command. The operation includes a nuclear attack submarine and P8 Poseidon reconnaissance aircraft .
CNN added that the operation also includes the USS Iwo Jima helicopter carrier, the Amphibious Ready Group with the USS Fort Lauderdale and the USS San Antonio, along with a guided-missile cruiser.
In that note to senior Pentagon officials, they specified that, for now, the troop increase is " primarily a show of force, the objective of which is more to send a message than to indicate the intention to carry out precision strikes against the cartels . "
This military deployment, presented as a supposed "fight against the cartels," is in reality and in principle a projection of power for broader political purposes. Behind the facade of " hemispheric security ," lies an agenda driven by certain power centers in Washington that pushes for a policy of open confrontation in the region.
But this escalation didn't happen abruptly, but gradually. The real turning point came in May, after the scandal involving former national security adviser Mike Waltz erupted in a Signal messaging group, triggering a reshuffle within Washington's security establishment.
Following this episode, Marco Rubio was appointed Acting National Security Advisor, simultaneously serving as Secretary of State. This dual role, reminiscent of the power concentrated by Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, gave Rubio unprecedented scope in matters of security and foreign policy, consolidating a more aggressive and centralized shift in the US agenda toward Latin America.
The National Security Advisor is the person who coordinates all U.S. security and defense agencies and articulates the strategic recommendations received by the president. In other words, Rubio not only influences diplomacy through the State Department but now also guides military and intelligence priorities.
In this framework, the advisor becomes the true strategic filter, capable of guiding the president toward more aggressive decisions, especially when factors such as pressure from military sectors and the narrative of the "war on terror" and drug trafficking converge.
This position places him in a privileged position within the executive branch to use the national security apparatus as a tool for his own political agenda, as Rubio has turned the anti-drug issue into a vector for regional securitization.
It is worth noting that the US naval deployment in the Caribbean also occurs after an episode that meant a political blow to Washington and, above all, to Marco Rubio in particular: the release of 252 Venezuelan citizens kidnapped in El Salvador .
The repatriation, achieved through direct efforts by President Nicolás Maduro and his government, represented a diplomatic victory that left Rubio utterly humiliated.
So, this military movement, which the former senator oversees, may have a strategic background that suggests these operations serve three main functions:
Psychological operations. The presence of warships in nearby waters seeks to undermine morale and influence Caracas's decision-making, sending a latent threat signal. These maneuvers are designed to intimidate without firing a single missile.
Calculated provocation. By placing military assets near Venezuela, Washington is raising tensions and forcing regional governments to speak out, creating a climate of harassment and even creating a casus belli .
Real military action capability. Although US officials insist this is a "show of force," Trump's executive order authorizes direct military operations.
In short, the US deployment is multifaceted and deliberately ambiguous: it combines deterrence, psychological pressure, and war preparation, with a clear political undertone of attacking the Venezuelan government.
Beyond the anti-drug rhetoric presented as justification, what's underway is a redesign of the regional landscape under the leadership of Rubio and the powerful sectors that support him.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/el-v ... enezolanas
******
Venezuela mobilizes 4.5 million militia members as US deploys troops to the Caribbean
Maduro activates Bolivarian National Militia in response to US “threats”, vowing to defend the country’s sovereignty and independence.
August 20, 2025 by Devin B. Martinez
Mobilization of the Bolivarian Militia in April 2025. Photo: Prensa Presidencial / Telegram
President Nicolás Maduro announced on Monday, August 18, that he is activating “over 4.5 million militia members across the entire national territory” of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in response to the US deployment of three Navy guided-missile destroyers and 4,000 military personnel to the Caribbean. The White House has described the deployment as an anti-drug trafficking operation in the region, while some analysts have called it a new threat against Venezuela – the country with the largest oil reserves in the world.
The US military deployment comes after Washington raised its bounty on the Venezuelan president from USD 25 million to USD 50 million, alleging links to drug cartels.
The “extravagant, bizarre, and outlandish threats” of the United States have been firmly rejected by the Venezuelan government.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Yván Gil described the accusations as a sign of desperation, revealing Washington’s “lack of credibility and the failure of its policies in the region”. He also pointed out that Venezuela has made major gains against drug trafficking after expelling the United States’ Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) – who many Venezuelans call “the planet’s chief drug traffickers” – from the country in 2005.
No US agency or international body has produced concrete evidence of drug production and distribution being concentrated in Venezuela or linked to Maduro. In fact, available global drug data makes almost no mention of the Caribbean nation or the alleged “Cartel of Suns” at all. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the epicenter of activity is in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, with the US identified as the main destination for distribution, recording the highest level of drug consumption in the world.
UNODC data reports that only 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela, and that the country is free of coca leaf cultivation, and marijuana and cocaine processing. The Trump administration, on the other hand, has maintained its position that the Venezuelan government is a “narco-terror cartel”.
Venezuela mobilizes as the US bares its teeth
Last week, mass protests across Venezuela denounced the “interventionist policies of the US government” following the bounty increase on Maduro and the accusation of cartel ties. However, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed the deployment of US troops to the region on August 14. On Tuesday, August 19, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if the administration was open to “boots on the ground” in Venezuela, to which she responded, “[Trump] is prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country.”
This week, Venezuela’s “prepared, activated, and armed” militia members are being deployed “throughout the entire territory, and meticulously, sector by sector”, as part of what the government is calling a peace plan to defend the principles of sovereignty and shared economic development.
“The Bolivarian National Militia is the people in arms, it is the genuine expression of civic-military union,” said Maduro in 2019, as he announced the incorporation of the militia that Hugo Chávez created – which has surged to nearly 5 million members, according to the government – into the Armed Forces as an official “combat unit”.
“We are also deployed throughout the Caribbean,” Venezuela’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello reminded the public. “Our sea, which is Venezuelan territory.”
The Venezuelan government is not alone in speaking out against the escalation of tensions in the Caribbean. When asked about the US military deployment during a regular press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico’s message to the region is, “No to interventionism. This is not just a conviction, it’s in the Constitution.”
To this day, the US does not recognize President Nicolás Maduro as the winner of the July 28 elections in Venezuela, claiming that opposition figure Edmundo González is the true president. In the months following the election, Washington targeted dozens of officials in the Venezuelan National Electoral Council (CNE) and other government departments with sanctions and visa bans, on top of the long-standing US economic blockade of the Bolivarian nation.
Despite the mounting pressure, Venezuelan officials are confident that the nation can defend its sovereignty. “It’s not about Maduro, it’s about the ordinary people, the people in the neighborhoods, the communities,” says Nahum Fernández, head of government in Caracas.
“This country belongs to Venezuelans; in the face of any threat, the Venezuelan people will not remain silent.”
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/08/20/ ... caribbean/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
The president doesn't have breakfast with a child every morning.
The Cayapo
Aug 21, 2025 , 12:01 pm .
(Photo: El Cayapo)
History is not studied only to know whether patriots, invaders, conquerors, stateless people, good people, bad people, religious people or atheists, communists or capitalists won, or to discern the supposed facts narrated, their boring dates, places, statistics, or the dazzling and magical battles, led by gifted beings, with which literature and cinema are made, but to unravel the rigged judgment that favors the victorious owners, teaching them how to maintain power over us in the future.
We slaves in contradiction must study history to understand where the reason for slavery, which still condemns us and keeps us tied to exploitation, while powerful elites exercise control over the mode of production, first took root.
Currently, the campaign against the government and its representatives is intensifying. The narrative about the fabricated Cartel of the Suns, associated with the Mexican cartels and the Aragua Train, is resurfacing. The "wanted" campaign against President Maduro, dead or alive, is once again increasing, and the price is rising to fifty million.
An international campaign is being waged against the government, accusing it of every crime past and present. There is no global institution that has not become complicit in these accusations, even though it has not been possible to prove that these fabricated reports are true, simply because they are fabricated and cannot be verified with reality.
But they habitually lie to pad the false case and thus justify their crimes, since, if the government were to lose the war against global imperial capitalism, all these cases would become real, thanks to the media and the complicity of global bureaucratic institutions, paid for by the capitalist empire. That is what the whole sham of history has truly done to the events of the past.
We slaves must study history in contradiction because it contains clues that can truly place us in past reality, clues that slip into the lines of those who write or codify real events, who, obeying their masters, describe events according to the convenience of the lords they pay or blackmail, and rarely allow chronicles to slip through that allow us to see events as they really occurred. It generally recalls deeds that never happened, events are disguised, actors are moved from place to place and date, protagonists are introduced who never participated, or the conduct of subjects in actions is changed, cowards are turned into heroes and heroes into cowards, and large numbers of people and supplies are placed on one side or the other for the convenience and benefit of the master who wins. But, above all, we must study history in depth to discover that we slaves have only participated in events as cannon fodder, in the interests of the masters, never for our own benefit. This rigged trial recounts facts, whether alleged or not, about the interests of the owners and, fundamentally, of the winners.
As is well known, slaves, throughout the long history of our species, have had no self-interest, and therefore have not been a class unto themselves, even though we are a class in and of ourselves. The events described were never driven by the interests of slaves; there was never such a thing as class struggle; it was always a confrontation between owners for power.
Today, perhaps, we slaves in conflict can understand the keys Chávez proposed to us and then become a class unto ourselves, capable of understanding the need to disappear in order to forever eliminate the struggle for power. The history known so far is the case prepared so that the court of the future will always rule against the innocent victim and whitewash the bloody wealth obtained through atrocities by the sinister criminal known by the nickname "human."
There is no better example to unravel the past than the present. We have been subjected to slavery for 533 years since nascent capitalism began its second accumulation of wealth-death in these lands and turned this region into yet another of its mines in the world. During these last 33 years, a war has been imposed on us by the transnational corporations of the capitalist empire, which has so far generated mass crimes, subjecting the population to food shortages, a lack of medicine and health supplies, psychological instigation, damage to state infrastructure, murder, and terrorism. It has also generated morbid anxiety and compulsive flight among significant sectors of the population who, unaware of the causes of their situation, end up blaming the government for their tragedy. Crimes typical of a culture like capitalism, from which we have not yet emerged.
The military, police, and intelligence actions carried out by the government are justified by the habitual aggression maintained by human capitalism, supported by traitors who besiege us from all borders and from within, with the complicity of academics, businessmen, and politicians paid by the owners of large transnational corporations, who so far have been unable to defeat the government.
These are the real facts: there is no civil war, there is no mass repression, the president doesn't have breakfast with a child every morning, so-called freedoms border on debauchery, anti-patriotic terrorist acts are regularly attempted, only to be met with government action that dilutes them, and the vast majority of those behind them are self-exiled, engaged in theft, blackmail, and conspiracy. On the other hand, the media, paid by global capitalism and its agencies, are doing well, cursing and inventing stories against the government because it refuses to be overthrown. The collusion between criminal gangs linked to drug trafficking, human trafficking, terrorism and the policy directed by the human-capitalist empire that seeks to overthrow the government and create great controlled chaos in this territory is the order of the day and their actions are protected by the so-called human rights defenders, influencers , social communicators, left and right politicians, scientists, academics, all at the service of large transnational capital.
The current situation urgently requires us to create mechanisms that narrate the facts as they happened, for the simple fact that we have no interest in remaining the dominant class. On the contrary, all our actions seek to eliminate ourselves as such and establish ourselves as a species outside the slave-master dichotomy.
Working on the idea of creating authentic, original thought, rooted in the blood, bones, and viscera of the cassava and tupiro-eaters who inhabit this land, taking into account the interests that concern us, is the most transcendental task that any person has ever set themselves from their condition as slaves in conflict across the planet, even if we don't know it or don't want to accept it.
To create in this territory what has never happened, what has never happened, we must be clear that imposing thinking has never emerged from a mine; it is the imitation of philosophers, imitators, and doctors of philosophy; it is urgent to understand that we have always depended on foreign ideas that serve foreign interests since the European invasion. It is extremely important to understand that it will not be easy to create another way of thinking from within, because the ideas of factories, consumption, buying and selling, democracy, freedom, private property, civilization-progress, and everything else that forms part of the framework of humanist culture are embedded in our brains as an inviolable duty.
For slaves born in the mine-territories invaded by capitalism across the planet, the first thing we must do is accept the past as a truncated fact in these territories. With the invasion of 1492, every cultural fact, be it mode of production, technology, religion, or art, has reached us sifted through the invader's sieve, always according to their interests. It is through their historical, anthropological, sociological, archaeological, religious, and scientific methods that we know whether the indigenous people, Africans, and other slaves brought to be exploited in these lands thought, laughed, ate, had affection, or were basic people, considered by the invader as just another animal; or if, on the contrary, the invader, in the name of valuing their nonexistent heroism in the eyes of the crown, financiers, the church, and bankers, invented the tale of gifted slaves, numerous, with a long history of war.
The closest truth is that European owners invaded this territory, whose people never understood that invasion, including the terms "in the name of the crown, God, or whoever, I hereby make myself the owner of you and these lands, along with everything else within them," because, quite simply, the concept of ownership simply did not exist among the few inhabitants of these lands. Therefore, this does not allow us to affirm that there was a strong culture here that considered ownership as a duty over all living things.
The Caribs, for example, there's no evidence of that culture as a powerful one, the culture of the toughest warrior on the planet, in the Americas. There's no evidence of a single garrison when the Spanish arrived. Why didn't they record that if it was already written down? Because it was a lie.
But behind this lie lies the humiliation and subjugation of extremely powerful beings, according to European legend, incapable of defeating the invader. The invader demonstrated his superiority not only technologically, intellectually, and spiritually, but above all in his heroism, by triumphing on the battlefield, where eighty Spaniards faced two thousand triple-warrior Indians, whom the Spanish won battle after battle. With this well-seasoned tale, the task was done on both sides of the pond.
All of that was a European invention; on those bases, the stories of the Caribs, the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans were broadcast, created, and invented, to the point that Mr. Mel Gibson's fiction that the Mayans sacrificed virgins and children is widely believed to be true. But there is no evidence of that power in any of those cultures, and there is no evidence in cultures like the Egyptian, or cultures like the Persians, or the Chinese, or the Arabs, or the Europeans, to name a few, where an empire has been taken by 80 or 100 commandos, except in war literature, such as the Iliad and its monstrosity, The Trojan Horse, which only the foolish reader absorbed in his fantasies can believe. And others, like those who believed the story that the Aztec and Inca emperors were deceived by the diplomatic skills of Hernán Cortés and Pizarro.
But where the hell did they get the story of Indian emperors and princesses on this continent? Perhaps it was a European extension. But the saviors of the poor drool over the fact that there were emperors here. They don't care that an emperor, in order to be one, invades, plunders, steals, murders, rapes, enslaves, because that tale of good and bad emperors only exists in fairy tales and history paid for by emperors, to wash their hands of their crimes.
Perhaps it can be considered credible, with its doubts, the idea that the Spartans, as an exclusively warrior culture, murdered children they considered defective at birth and threw them off a cliff, but from the perspective of life as a natural fact, no culture is known, except in fictional literature, that sacrifices children or virgins, because that is an attack on the continuity of life, the genetic memory of life in all species, is to reproduce and preserve oneself in whatever conditions, to give continuity to life. But the West, with its humanist thinking, was responsible for turning everything that was not human-Anglo-Saxon-powerful into barbarians, cannibals, savages, yellow, apes, inferior child-eaters.
Nothing indicates that a powerful culture ever existed here in these territories. There are no ancient writings that confirm or deny this, because even their descendants ended up endorsing these sayings, these myths, as incontrovertible truths when they studied in the churches, universities, schools, and archives that transmit this knowledge.
On the other hand, the myths that sustain power, however implausible they may seem or be in light of today's study, all have a beginning and an end, a past, present, future, and a linear continuity that tells us all that this is the truth, the way, and the life, this is the language of God because the Ten Commandments were made on this stone, and on this papyrus, and in this book, and in this Bible, and in this Koran, and in this Talmud, and everything was written, made, painted, and engraved.
But those people who are ashamed of having been born in these lands want to invent a story to justify their existence embedded in powerful myths in order to feel on equal terms with their foreign masters, whom they serve with admiration and stupidity because they cannot understand that we were not civilizations like those sold to us by the Europeans, people who fail to grasp the dimensions of the worldviews of cultures but rather assume that everyone corresponds to that single thought from which their misinformed brains drink in the information and ideological transmission apparatuses where they study.
People who swallowed the story that everyone is equal, that we were born from Adam and Eve, that the entire earth is a single paradise where, unfortunately, sin lives within us. For that kind of thinking, there is no climate, no geography, no space, no historical or real time that is different. For those people, everything is a blank slate, a parking lot and a highway with a thousand interconnected branches, and a single megaphone broadcasting in a single language, with a human-Anglo-Saxon pater familias governing everything from the same house, wearing the same clothes, where we all happily belong, forever, to humanism.
In every culture, since the beginning of time, the only universe known to exist is the sky where people observe the stars from their limited sights. And we're talking about thousands and thousands of universes, as many as there are villages. But there are people who, from the worldview of the ashamed, cannot understand the dimension, the size of this land, from Quiriquire to Alaska, and they pretend to give a supposedly ancient name like Abya Ayala to a geographical unit like the American continent, when there are people in Venezuela who are unaware of the existence of peoples from one state to another. It would be foolish to think that people from the 1400s could have any notion of the existence of any territory other than its continuity. It would be difficult to have a geographical-political unity of the continent in any culture because, if that were the case, for example, how is it that the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans, for twenty-three years during which the Spanish lasted on the islands, being the empires they claim to be, could not detect them? How the Caribs, who, according to rumors, traveled from the Upper Orinoco to the Gulf of Mexico, couldn't detect the Spanish anywhere, even though the Caribs were supposedly the most fierce warrior culture, masters and lords of the waters, currents, and lands known to them. But no, the dishonored need to match their masters without realizing they're crawling.
It's clear that we need to study the facts with suspicion: when, where, who, with what technology, religion, and resources they invaded us. What mode of production existed in these lands.
Power taught us that there are two myths: there's the myth of power, which we're taught in school, and the myth of the left, which generates the tale of resistance. The interesting thing isn't that the Spanish constructed them and used them in some way to sell them in Europe as economic opportunities, as well as to endorse the supposed heroism of the invaders and scare away their cowardice and crimes, but that we ended up believing in that mythology, especially the one sold to us by the saviors of the poor, and we began to defend it. There's a book by Galeano, for example, that speaks of eighty million indigenous people destroyed by the Europeans here in South America, and no one has asked what the mode of production was that existed at the time because we know what the mode of production was that allowed so many people to accumulate in small cities, but until now there are no traces of any mode of production or dynamic activity that compelled the accumulation of the masses.
The myth of indigenous heroism validated the myth, or lie, of European heroism in these invaded lands, because it's not the number of deaths that constitutes a crime committed by Europeans that matters, but the conditions in which the people were killed. Killing a thousand armed Ukrainian soldiers in battle is not the same as killing a hundred unarmed indigenous people. It's true, in both cases they are killed, and it should be a source of grief for the community. But the dead indigenous people did not have the same defensive capacity as the thousand Ukrainian soldiers.
It's not the same thing if someone says in their medicine cabinet that they murdered and raped an old woman and a little girl who fiercely and heroically defended themselves, or if they confronted armed men who outnumbered them and managed to prevail, escaping the situation with only a few injuries. In the first case, they are a heartless criminal justified in heroically defending the murdered and raped women, and in the second, a true hero. This is the story the Europeans told to justify their monstrous crime. In both cases, the invader wins.
One piece of information Europeans use to hide their crime is that they brought us religion, writing, science, language, and civilization. It's true that they brought them, but who was asking them to do it? Who invited them to invade us and impose such things on us? Where is the letter of invitation? To come urgently and impose your ways, customs, and habits on us? From you, the greedy and needy inhabitants of these lands, who will forever be grateful.
The story of resistance gave credence to the European myth. In the end, both myths serve and legitimize power; we cannot echo those myths. Just as the Spanish do not echo the fact that they were defeated by the Bolivarians in the War of Independence.
With the new knowledge produced by capitalism, we can reconstruct the narrative of events honestly and from there, walk and live with others. Because tragedy doesn't need to invent lies or construct ideologies to be revealed; its presence in history is overwhelming, even when they've always tried to hide it. We slaves have no knowledge or interest to show, beyond saying, "Oh, it hurts, don't hit me so hard!" But those myths must be dismantled. We cannot be authentic if we don't start from the truth.
Since the arrival of Europeans to these lands, people have been measured by the blank slate of humanism, and of course, no one fits those cultural shoes—and look how we've tried—because we don't meet the parameters of the humanist table. From then on, our descendants, even if we study in their universities and schools, know the manners of Carreño's etiquette manual, graduate with PhDs in philosophy, have museums, athenaeums, cultural centers, democracy, equality, liberty, fraternity, progress, and produce like capitalists, will never be classified, much less accepted, as masters of the game. For example, democracy isn't variegated, but rather what they say it is. If there's a referendum in Ukraine and 98 percent of the people vote to remain Russian, for the human elite, that's a dictatorship; if democracy in Venezuela is participatory and protagonistic, for them, it's a dictatorship. If the empire invades and massacres Libya, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Haiti, Yemen and half the world, that is a democracy in progress, alive and active.
Thinking is the only option for slaves to stop being slaves.
https://misionverdad.com/chavismo/el-pr ... as-mananas
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US Empire Deploys Warships Near Venezuela, Does Not Rule Out ‘Use of Force’
August 21, 2025
US imperial navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge departs Naval Station Norfolk for a regularly scheduled deployment as part of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, June 24, 2025, Norfork, Virginia. Photo: Mc1 Anderson Branch/US Navy/Zuma Press.
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According to reports from international news agencies, Washington has not ruled out the possibility of troops from the US empire entering Venezuelan territory. These agencies have also reported that three Aegis guided-missile destroyers—USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, and USS Sampson—will arrive off the Venezuelan coast within the next 36 hours.
This Tuesday, August 19, a reporter asked White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt if the Trump administration was considering sending troops there, following the reports of the destroyers being deployed near the South American nation. “With respect to Venezuela, President Trump has been very clear and consistent,” the official responded. “He is willing to use all the resources at his disposal to stop the flow of drugs into our country and bring those responsible to justice.”
An official from the State Department of the US entity, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the operation will mobilize some 4,000 sailors and marines, P-8 spy planes, additional vessels, and at least one attack submarine. These forces, he said, will not only conduct “intelligence and surveillance” but could also serve as launching pads for “targeted attacks.”
The move comes in parallel with Washington’s decision to double the reward for Nicolás Maduro’s “capture,” now set at $50 million. The high reward was initially set by the US empire’s Department of Justice during Donald Trump’s first administration in March 2020, following accusations of “narcoterrorism” against the executive branch and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials. Former President Joe Biden later raised other rewards: $25 million for Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and $15 million for Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López.
Despite the official narrative, neither the Department of Justice nor the State Department of the US colony have presented evidence to date supporting criminal activities by President Maduro or high ranked Venezuelan officials. Nor is there any judicial evidence linking the so-called Cártel de los Soles—included on July 25 in the US empire’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations—to specific drug seizures or a clear trafficking structure.
The rhetoric used in Washington and the scale of the deployment point to an intensification of regime change pressure, now including military threats against the head of the Venezuelan government.
Meanwhile, in Caracas, President Maduro announced the mobilization of 4.5 million militia members across the country, tasking them with “defending our seas, skies, and lands” against what he described as “the unusual and strange threat of a declining empire.” The plan includes the activation of indigenous, agricultural, and worker militias.
Donald Trump has painted the “fight against cartels” as the new façade of his foreign policy on the continent, a long-standing Washington strategy now exaggerated to justify potential military interventions. In recent months, the Trump administration has designated criminal organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Tren de Aragua as “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” The designation provides a legal framework to legitimize the expansion of the use of military forces in the region, and opens the door to both unilateral actions and a dangerous militarization of the US empire’s foreign policy in Latin America.
(Diario Red) by Crismar Lujano with Orinoco Tribune content
https://orinocotribune.com/us-empire-de ... -of-force/
Venezuela: US Empire’s Accusations Against President Maduro a Sign of Desperation
August 21, 2025
Former US empire Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman during a press conference announcing indictments against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and other officials in 2020. Photo: X/@SDNYnews/File photo.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—Venezuela’s minister for foreign affairs, Yván Gil, has issued a firm statement asserting that recent accusations by the US empire demonstrate clear desperation and represent a total lack of credibility of the Trump administration’s Latin American policies.
The government of the US entity claims—without providing evidence—that a drug trafficking network in Venezuela is led by President Nicolás Maduro under the so-called Cartel de los Soles, which it alleges is connected to the Tren de Aragua and Sinaloa Cartel criminal organizations.
Gil’s statement, made this Tuesday, August 19, rebuffed these unsupported claims, detailing Venezuela’s active and successful fight against organized crime and drug trafficking. The foreign minister noted that since the expulsion of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from Venezuelan territory in 2005, the government has assumed full control of the fight against drugs, strengthening security, increasing drug seizures, and enhancing internal cooperation.
Through ongoing operations, various Venezuelan law enforcement agencies have achieved successful arrests, dismantled criminal networks, and effectively controlled borders and coasts. In recent years, authorities have seized large quantities of narcotics and dismantled major criminal groups. However, these achievements have been systematically ignored by the Trump administration, despite being recognized even by the United Nations and the European Union.
Gil emphasized that the US colony’s threats jeopardize more than just the Venezuelan people; they threaten the stability of the entire region, including the Zone of Peace declared by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) across the region. This zone is a space that promotes sovereignty and cooperation among peoples while nourishing peace.
The statement concluded that despite constant defamation, Venezuela continues to make effective progress against organized crime. The will of the people and the commitment of the government are unwavering. Ultimately, the baseless accusations of the US empire are merely an attempt to delegitimize the achievements of a nation defending its sovereignty.
Below, you can read the unofficial translation of the Venezuelan statement:
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela clearly sees the desperation of the US administration, which resorts to threats and defamation against our country. Washington’s accusing Venezuela of drug trafficking reveals its lack of credibility and the failure of its policies in the region.
Since the expulsion of the DEA from our territory in 2005, Venezuela has achieved significant results in the fight against organized crime: successful arrests, dismantling of networks, and effective control of borders and coasts, the result of the efforts and commitment of our institutions and the Venezuelan people.
These threats not only affect Venezuela, but also threaten the peace and stability of the entire region, including the Zone of Peace declared by CELAC, a space that promotes sovereignty and cooperation among Latin American peoples.
While Washington threatens, Venezuela is moving forward firmly in peace and sovereignty, demonstrating that true effectiveness against crime is achieved by respecting the independence of peoples.
Every aggressive statement confirms imperialism’s inability to subdue a free and sovereign people.
The people of Bolívar and Chávez will continue to defeat any attempt at intervention. Venezuela is a beacon of dignity, resilience, and security for Latin America and the world.
Caracas, August 19, 2025.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-us ... speration/
The CayapoAug 21, 2025 , 12:01 pm .
(Photo: El Cayapo)
History is not studied only to know whether patriots, invaders, conquerors, stateless people, good people, bad people, religious people or atheists, communists or capitalists won, or to discern the supposed facts narrated, their boring dates, places, statistics, or the dazzling and magical battles, led by gifted beings, with which literature and cinema are made, but to unravel the rigged judgment that favors the victorious owners, teaching them how to maintain power over us in the future.
We slaves in contradiction must study history to understand where the reason for slavery, which still condemns us and keeps us tied to exploitation, while powerful elites exercise control over the mode of production, first took root.
Currently, the campaign against the government and its representatives is intensifying. The narrative about the fabricated Cartel of the Suns, associated with the Mexican cartels and the Aragua Train, is resurfacing. The "wanted" campaign against President Maduro, dead or alive, is once again increasing, and the price is rising to fifty million.
An international campaign is being waged against the government, accusing it of every crime past and present. There is no global institution that has not become complicit in these accusations, even though it has not been possible to prove that these fabricated reports are true, simply because they are fabricated and cannot be verified with reality.
But they habitually lie to pad the false case and thus justify their crimes, since, if the government were to lose the war against global imperial capitalism, all these cases would become real, thanks to the media and the complicity of global bureaucratic institutions, paid for by the capitalist empire. That is what the whole sham of history has truly done to the events of the past.
We slaves must study history in contradiction because it contains clues that can truly place us in past reality, clues that slip into the lines of those who write or codify real events, who, obeying their masters, describe events according to the convenience of the lords they pay or blackmail, and rarely allow chronicles to slip through that allow us to see events as they really occurred. It generally recalls deeds that never happened, events are disguised, actors are moved from place to place and date, protagonists are introduced who never participated, or the conduct of subjects in actions is changed, cowards are turned into heroes and heroes into cowards, and large numbers of people and supplies are placed on one side or the other for the convenience and benefit of the master who wins. But, above all, we must study history in depth to discover that we slaves have only participated in events as cannon fodder, in the interests of the masters, never for our own benefit. This rigged trial recounts facts, whether alleged or not, about the interests of the owners and, fundamentally, of the winners.
As is well known, slaves, throughout the long history of our species, have had no self-interest, and therefore have not been a class unto themselves, even though we are a class in and of ourselves. The events described were never driven by the interests of slaves; there was never such a thing as class struggle; it was always a confrontation between owners for power.
Today, perhaps, we slaves in conflict can understand the keys Chávez proposed to us and then become a class unto ourselves, capable of understanding the need to disappear in order to forever eliminate the struggle for power. The history known so far is the case prepared so that the court of the future will always rule against the innocent victim and whitewash the bloody wealth obtained through atrocities by the sinister criminal known by the nickname "human."
There is no better example to unravel the past than the present. We have been subjected to slavery for 533 years since nascent capitalism began its second accumulation of wealth-death in these lands and turned this region into yet another of its mines in the world. During these last 33 years, a war has been imposed on us by the transnational corporations of the capitalist empire, which has so far generated mass crimes, subjecting the population to food shortages, a lack of medicine and health supplies, psychological instigation, damage to state infrastructure, murder, and terrorism. It has also generated morbid anxiety and compulsive flight among significant sectors of the population who, unaware of the causes of their situation, end up blaming the government for their tragedy. Crimes typical of a culture like capitalism, from which we have not yet emerged.
The military, police, and intelligence actions carried out by the government are justified by the habitual aggression maintained by human capitalism, supported by traitors who besiege us from all borders and from within, with the complicity of academics, businessmen, and politicians paid by the owners of large transnational corporations, who so far have been unable to defeat the government.
These are the real facts: there is no civil war, there is no mass repression, the president doesn't have breakfast with a child every morning, so-called freedoms border on debauchery, anti-patriotic terrorist acts are regularly attempted, only to be met with government action that dilutes them, and the vast majority of those behind them are self-exiled, engaged in theft, blackmail, and conspiracy. On the other hand, the media, paid by global capitalism and its agencies, are doing well, cursing and inventing stories against the government because it refuses to be overthrown. The collusion between criminal gangs linked to drug trafficking, human trafficking, terrorism and the policy directed by the human-capitalist empire that seeks to overthrow the government and create great controlled chaos in this territory is the order of the day and their actions are protected by the so-called human rights defenders, influencers , social communicators, left and right politicians, scientists, academics, all at the service of large transnational capital.
The current situation urgently requires us to create mechanisms that narrate the facts as they happened, for the simple fact that we have no interest in remaining the dominant class. On the contrary, all our actions seek to eliminate ourselves as such and establish ourselves as a species outside the slave-master dichotomy.
Working on the idea of creating authentic, original thought, rooted in the blood, bones, and viscera of the cassava and tupiro-eaters who inhabit this land, taking into account the interests that concern us, is the most transcendental task that any person has ever set themselves from their condition as slaves in conflict across the planet, even if we don't know it or don't want to accept it.
To create in this territory what has never happened, what has never happened, we must be clear that imposing thinking has never emerged from a mine; it is the imitation of philosophers, imitators, and doctors of philosophy; it is urgent to understand that we have always depended on foreign ideas that serve foreign interests since the European invasion. It is extremely important to understand that it will not be easy to create another way of thinking from within, because the ideas of factories, consumption, buying and selling, democracy, freedom, private property, civilization-progress, and everything else that forms part of the framework of humanist culture are embedded in our brains as an inviolable duty.
For slaves born in the mine-territories invaded by capitalism across the planet, the first thing we must do is accept the past as a truncated fact in these territories. With the invasion of 1492, every cultural fact, be it mode of production, technology, religion, or art, has reached us sifted through the invader's sieve, always according to their interests. It is through their historical, anthropological, sociological, archaeological, religious, and scientific methods that we know whether the indigenous people, Africans, and other slaves brought to be exploited in these lands thought, laughed, ate, had affection, or were basic people, considered by the invader as just another animal; or if, on the contrary, the invader, in the name of valuing their nonexistent heroism in the eyes of the crown, financiers, the church, and bankers, invented the tale of gifted slaves, numerous, with a long history of war.
The closest truth is that European owners invaded this territory, whose people never understood that invasion, including the terms "in the name of the crown, God, or whoever, I hereby make myself the owner of you and these lands, along with everything else within them," because, quite simply, the concept of ownership simply did not exist among the few inhabitants of these lands. Therefore, this does not allow us to affirm that there was a strong culture here that considered ownership as a duty over all living things.
The Caribs, for example, there's no evidence of that culture as a powerful one, the culture of the toughest warrior on the planet, in the Americas. There's no evidence of a single garrison when the Spanish arrived. Why didn't they record that if it was already written down? Because it was a lie.
But behind this lie lies the humiliation and subjugation of extremely powerful beings, according to European legend, incapable of defeating the invader. The invader demonstrated his superiority not only technologically, intellectually, and spiritually, but above all in his heroism, by triumphing on the battlefield, where eighty Spaniards faced two thousand triple-warrior Indians, whom the Spanish won battle after battle. With this well-seasoned tale, the task was done on both sides of the pond.
All of that was a European invention; on those bases, the stories of the Caribs, the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans were broadcast, created, and invented, to the point that Mr. Mel Gibson's fiction that the Mayans sacrificed virgins and children is widely believed to be true. But there is no evidence of that power in any of those cultures, and there is no evidence in cultures like the Egyptian, or cultures like the Persians, or the Chinese, or the Arabs, or the Europeans, to name a few, where an empire has been taken by 80 or 100 commandos, except in war literature, such as the Iliad and its monstrosity, The Trojan Horse, which only the foolish reader absorbed in his fantasies can believe. And others, like those who believed the story that the Aztec and Inca emperors were deceived by the diplomatic skills of Hernán Cortés and Pizarro.
But where the hell did they get the story of Indian emperors and princesses on this continent? Perhaps it was a European extension. But the saviors of the poor drool over the fact that there were emperors here. They don't care that an emperor, in order to be one, invades, plunders, steals, murders, rapes, enslaves, because that tale of good and bad emperors only exists in fairy tales and history paid for by emperors, to wash their hands of their crimes.
Perhaps it can be considered credible, with its doubts, the idea that the Spartans, as an exclusively warrior culture, murdered children they considered defective at birth and threw them off a cliff, but from the perspective of life as a natural fact, no culture is known, except in fictional literature, that sacrifices children or virgins, because that is an attack on the continuity of life, the genetic memory of life in all species, is to reproduce and preserve oneself in whatever conditions, to give continuity to life. But the West, with its humanist thinking, was responsible for turning everything that was not human-Anglo-Saxon-powerful into barbarians, cannibals, savages, yellow, apes, inferior child-eaters.
Nothing indicates that a powerful culture ever existed here in these territories. There are no ancient writings that confirm or deny this, because even their descendants ended up endorsing these sayings, these myths, as incontrovertible truths when they studied in the churches, universities, schools, and archives that transmit this knowledge.
On the other hand, the myths that sustain power, however implausible they may seem or be in light of today's study, all have a beginning and an end, a past, present, future, and a linear continuity that tells us all that this is the truth, the way, and the life, this is the language of God because the Ten Commandments were made on this stone, and on this papyrus, and in this book, and in this Bible, and in this Koran, and in this Talmud, and everything was written, made, painted, and engraved.
But those people who are ashamed of having been born in these lands want to invent a story to justify their existence embedded in powerful myths in order to feel on equal terms with their foreign masters, whom they serve with admiration and stupidity because they cannot understand that we were not civilizations like those sold to us by the Europeans, people who fail to grasp the dimensions of the worldviews of cultures but rather assume that everyone corresponds to that single thought from which their misinformed brains drink in the information and ideological transmission apparatuses where they study.
People who swallowed the story that everyone is equal, that we were born from Adam and Eve, that the entire earth is a single paradise where, unfortunately, sin lives within us. For that kind of thinking, there is no climate, no geography, no space, no historical or real time that is different. For those people, everything is a blank slate, a parking lot and a highway with a thousand interconnected branches, and a single megaphone broadcasting in a single language, with a human-Anglo-Saxon pater familias governing everything from the same house, wearing the same clothes, where we all happily belong, forever, to humanism.
In every culture, since the beginning of time, the only universe known to exist is the sky where people observe the stars from their limited sights. And we're talking about thousands and thousands of universes, as many as there are villages. But there are people who, from the worldview of the ashamed, cannot understand the dimension, the size of this land, from Quiriquire to Alaska, and they pretend to give a supposedly ancient name like Abya Ayala to a geographical unit like the American continent, when there are people in Venezuela who are unaware of the existence of peoples from one state to another. It would be foolish to think that people from the 1400s could have any notion of the existence of any territory other than its continuity. It would be difficult to have a geographical-political unity of the continent in any culture because, if that were the case, for example, how is it that the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mayans, for twenty-three years during which the Spanish lasted on the islands, being the empires they claim to be, could not detect them? How the Caribs, who, according to rumors, traveled from the Upper Orinoco to the Gulf of Mexico, couldn't detect the Spanish anywhere, even though the Caribs were supposedly the most fierce warrior culture, masters and lords of the waters, currents, and lands known to them. But no, the dishonored need to match their masters without realizing they're crawling.
It's clear that we need to study the facts with suspicion: when, where, who, with what technology, religion, and resources they invaded us. What mode of production existed in these lands.
Power taught us that there are two myths: there's the myth of power, which we're taught in school, and the myth of the left, which generates the tale of resistance. The interesting thing isn't that the Spanish constructed them and used them in some way to sell them in Europe as economic opportunities, as well as to endorse the supposed heroism of the invaders and scare away their cowardice and crimes, but that we ended up believing in that mythology, especially the one sold to us by the saviors of the poor, and we began to defend it. There's a book by Galeano, for example, that speaks of eighty million indigenous people destroyed by the Europeans here in South America, and no one has asked what the mode of production was that existed at the time because we know what the mode of production was that allowed so many people to accumulate in small cities, but until now there are no traces of any mode of production or dynamic activity that compelled the accumulation of the masses.
The myth of indigenous heroism validated the myth, or lie, of European heroism in these invaded lands, because it's not the number of deaths that constitutes a crime committed by Europeans that matters, but the conditions in which the people were killed. Killing a thousand armed Ukrainian soldiers in battle is not the same as killing a hundred unarmed indigenous people. It's true, in both cases they are killed, and it should be a source of grief for the community. But the dead indigenous people did not have the same defensive capacity as the thousand Ukrainian soldiers.
It's not the same thing if someone says in their medicine cabinet that they murdered and raped an old woman and a little girl who fiercely and heroically defended themselves, or if they confronted armed men who outnumbered them and managed to prevail, escaping the situation with only a few injuries. In the first case, they are a heartless criminal justified in heroically defending the murdered and raped women, and in the second, a true hero. This is the story the Europeans told to justify their monstrous crime. In both cases, the invader wins.
One piece of information Europeans use to hide their crime is that they brought us religion, writing, science, language, and civilization. It's true that they brought them, but who was asking them to do it? Who invited them to invade us and impose such things on us? Where is the letter of invitation? To come urgently and impose your ways, customs, and habits on us? From you, the greedy and needy inhabitants of these lands, who will forever be grateful.
The story of resistance gave credence to the European myth. In the end, both myths serve and legitimize power; we cannot echo those myths. Just as the Spanish do not echo the fact that they were defeated by the Bolivarians in the War of Independence.
With the new knowledge produced by capitalism, we can reconstruct the narrative of events honestly and from there, walk and live with others. Because tragedy doesn't need to invent lies or construct ideologies to be revealed; its presence in history is overwhelming, even when they've always tried to hide it. We slaves have no knowledge or interest to show, beyond saying, "Oh, it hurts, don't hit me so hard!" But those myths must be dismantled. We cannot be authentic if we don't start from the truth.
Since the arrival of Europeans to these lands, people have been measured by the blank slate of humanism, and of course, no one fits those cultural shoes—and look how we've tried—because we don't meet the parameters of the humanist table. From then on, our descendants, even if we study in their universities and schools, know the manners of Carreño's etiquette manual, graduate with PhDs in philosophy, have museums, athenaeums, cultural centers, democracy, equality, liberty, fraternity, progress, and produce like capitalists, will never be classified, much less accepted, as masters of the game. For example, democracy isn't variegated, but rather what they say it is. If there's a referendum in Ukraine and 98 percent of the people vote to remain Russian, for the human elite, that's a dictatorship; if democracy in Venezuela is participatory and protagonistic, for them, it's a dictatorship. If the empire invades and massacres Libya, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Haiti, Yemen and half the world, that is a democracy in progress, alive and active.
Thinking is the only option for slaves to stop being slaves.
https://misionverdad.com/chavismo/el-pr ... as-mananas
Google Translator
******
US Empire Deploys Warships Near Venezuela, Does Not Rule Out ‘Use of Force’
August 21, 2025
US imperial navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Bainbridge departs Naval Station Norfolk for a regularly scheduled deployment as part of the Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, June 24, 2025, Norfork, Virginia. Photo: Mc1 Anderson Branch/US Navy/Zuma Press.
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According to reports from international news agencies, Washington has not ruled out the possibility of troops from the US empire entering Venezuelan territory. These agencies have also reported that three Aegis guided-missile destroyers—USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, and USS Sampson—will arrive off the Venezuelan coast within the next 36 hours.
This Tuesday, August 19, a reporter asked White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt if the Trump administration was considering sending troops there, following the reports of the destroyers being deployed near the South American nation. “With respect to Venezuela, President Trump has been very clear and consistent,” the official responded. “He is willing to use all the resources at his disposal to stop the flow of drugs into our country and bring those responsible to justice.”
An official from the State Department of the US entity, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the operation will mobilize some 4,000 sailors and marines, P-8 spy planes, additional vessels, and at least one attack submarine. These forces, he said, will not only conduct “intelligence and surveillance” but could also serve as launching pads for “targeted attacks.”
The move comes in parallel with Washington’s decision to double the reward for Nicolás Maduro’s “capture,” now set at $50 million. The high reward was initially set by the US empire’s Department of Justice during Donald Trump’s first administration in March 2020, following accusations of “narcoterrorism” against the executive branch and other high-ranking Venezuelan officials. Former President Joe Biden later raised other rewards: $25 million for Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and $15 million for Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López.
Despite the official narrative, neither the Department of Justice nor the State Department of the US colony have presented evidence to date supporting criminal activities by President Maduro or high ranked Venezuelan officials. Nor is there any judicial evidence linking the so-called Cártel de los Soles—included on July 25 in the US empire’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations—to specific drug seizures or a clear trafficking structure.
The rhetoric used in Washington and the scale of the deployment point to an intensification of regime change pressure, now including military threats against the head of the Venezuelan government.
Meanwhile, in Caracas, President Maduro announced the mobilization of 4.5 million militia members across the country, tasking them with “defending our seas, skies, and lands” against what he described as “the unusual and strange threat of a declining empire.” The plan includes the activation of indigenous, agricultural, and worker militias.
Donald Trump has painted the “fight against cartels” as the new façade of his foreign policy on the continent, a long-standing Washington strategy now exaggerated to justify potential military interventions. In recent months, the Trump administration has designated criminal organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Tren de Aragua as “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” The designation provides a legal framework to legitimize the expansion of the use of military forces in the region, and opens the door to both unilateral actions and a dangerous militarization of the US empire’s foreign policy in Latin America.
(Diario Red) by Crismar Lujano with Orinoco Tribune content
https://orinocotribune.com/us-empire-de ... -of-force/
Venezuela: US Empire’s Accusations Against President Maduro a Sign of Desperation
August 21, 2025
Former US empire Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman during a press conference announcing indictments against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and other officials in 2020. Photo: X/@SDNYnews/File photo.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—Venezuela’s minister for foreign affairs, Yván Gil, has issued a firm statement asserting that recent accusations by the US empire demonstrate clear desperation and represent a total lack of credibility of the Trump administration’s Latin American policies.
The government of the US entity claims—without providing evidence—that a drug trafficking network in Venezuela is led by President Nicolás Maduro under the so-called Cartel de los Soles, which it alleges is connected to the Tren de Aragua and Sinaloa Cartel criminal organizations.
Gil’s statement, made this Tuesday, August 19, rebuffed these unsupported claims, detailing Venezuela’s active and successful fight against organized crime and drug trafficking. The foreign minister noted that since the expulsion of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from Venezuelan territory in 2005, the government has assumed full control of the fight against drugs, strengthening security, increasing drug seizures, and enhancing internal cooperation.
Through ongoing operations, various Venezuelan law enforcement agencies have achieved successful arrests, dismantled criminal networks, and effectively controlled borders and coasts. In recent years, authorities have seized large quantities of narcotics and dismantled major criminal groups. However, these achievements have been systematically ignored by the Trump administration, despite being recognized even by the United Nations and the European Union.
Gil emphasized that the US colony’s threats jeopardize more than just the Venezuelan people; they threaten the stability of the entire region, including the Zone of Peace declared by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) across the region. This zone is a space that promotes sovereignty and cooperation among peoples while nourishing peace.
The statement concluded that despite constant defamation, Venezuela continues to make effective progress against organized crime. The will of the people and the commitment of the government are unwavering. Ultimately, the baseless accusations of the US empire are merely an attempt to delegitimize the achievements of a nation defending its sovereignty.
Below, you can read the unofficial translation of the Venezuelan statement:
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela clearly sees the desperation of the US administration, which resorts to threats and defamation against our country. Washington’s accusing Venezuela of drug trafficking reveals its lack of credibility and the failure of its policies in the region.
Since the expulsion of the DEA from our territory in 2005, Venezuela has achieved significant results in the fight against organized crime: successful arrests, dismantling of networks, and effective control of borders and coasts, the result of the efforts and commitment of our institutions and the Venezuelan people.
These threats not only affect Venezuela, but also threaten the peace and stability of the entire region, including the Zone of Peace declared by CELAC, a space that promotes sovereignty and cooperation among Latin American peoples.
While Washington threatens, Venezuela is moving forward firmly in peace and sovereignty, demonstrating that true effectiveness against crime is achieved by respecting the independence of peoples.
Every aggressive statement confirms imperialism’s inability to subdue a free and sovereign people.
The people of Bolívar and Chávez will continue to defeat any attempt at intervention. Venezuela is a beacon of dignity, resilience, and security for Latin America and the world.
Caracas, August 19, 2025.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-us ... speration/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
White House Does Not Rule Out Launching Military Strike Against Venezuela
August 29, 2025
Aerial view of USS New Orleans leading the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Rafael Peralta in formation, during a patrol in international waters in the East China Sea, May 24, 2020. Photo: US Navy/File photo.
The US empire has not ruled out the possibility of using military force against Venezuela, according to statements made by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
During a press conference this Thursday, August 28, Leavitt answered a question about whether President Donald Trump was considering launching military strikes against the Venezuelan territory, stating that the president “is willing to use all” of his country’s resources to “stop the flow of drugs.”
“I won’t pre-empt the president on any military action or related issues,” she added. “But what I will tell you is that many nations in the Caribbean and the region have applauded this administration’s counter-drug operations and efforts.”
Leavitt further stated that the president of the US empire “is prepared to use every element of [US imperial] power to prevent drugs from flooding our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”
“It is the highest responsibility of this president and this administration,” she insisted, “to prevent the illicit flow of drugs into our country and protect citizens from these deadly poisons.”
It is worth noting that Leavitt opted to ignore the absence of evidence for her claims and the lengthy involvement of the US empire in trafficking drugs through Latin America in utilizing it as a pretext for colonial interference and warmongering.
Rising tensions
In the last month, already strained relations between the US empire and Venezuela deteriorated further after the attorney general of the US entity, Pam Bondi, announced an increase from US$25 million to US$50 million in the bounty offered for information leading to the “capture” of President Maduro, whom Washington accuses without evidence of leading several drug cartels.
The situation escalated further after the confirmation of the deployment of US colonial military forces to the southern Caribbean Sea to supposedly combat international drug trafficking, without providing precise details about the scope, duration, or locations of operations.
This raised alarm bells and prompted statements from several leaders, both in the region and beyond, who interpreted the stated objective as a pretext to violate Venezuelan or third-party sovereignty and undermine regional peace.
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino noted that fake news is being spread portraying his country as a narco-state, which is inconsistent with reality and is a weapon used “to force an internal breakdown.”
Caracas’ reaction
In a recent speech, President Maduro announced a “special plan” to mobilize five million militia members “throughout the national territory,” in response to threats from the US empire. These operations took place last weekend, and the president announced this Monday that two new training sessions will be held to defend the country’s sovereignty in the face of the US empire’s military deployment in the southern Caribbean.
Meanwhile, countries such as México, Colombia, Honduras, Bolivia, Cuba, Russia, China, Belarus, and Iran have all condemned the possibility of Washington opening a war front in South America under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking. President Maduro has also publicly expressed his gratitude for the displays of solidarity his country has received from other governments in response to US imperialist threats.
https://orinocotribune.com/white-house- ... venezuela/
Marco Rubio’s Fingerprints on Washington’s Agenda Against Venezuela
August 27, 2025
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
By Misión Verdad – Aug 25, 2025
Marco Rubio is one of the main architects of the offensive against Venezuela, to the point of having his obsessive personal agenda gain traction in the White House. His actions reveal a sustained calculation that has influenced presidential decisions.
The aforementioned has deliberately intensified the rhetoric that seeks to portray Venezuela as a threat to regional security.
Although this narrative is not new, the strategy combines media accusations with the dissemination of topics such as the “Aragua Train,” the re-creation of the “Cartel of the Suns,” and the constant promotion of false flag operations at the borders, all designed to amplify the perception of danger.
These elements function as a “spark moment,” deliberately constructed to capture President Donald Trump’s attention and pressure him to prioritize the Venezuela agenda.
This is a basic and well-known plan: the United States has historically used anti-drug rhetoric as a justification for interventions in Latin America.
Since Nixon’s declaration of the “war on drugs” in the late 1960s, the US government has used this framework to intervene politically, economically, covertly, and sometimes militarily in countries such as Panama and Grenada.
In the Venezuelan case, this manual applies because the idea that the country constitutes a “real danger” to international security gets normalized, and once this perception has taken hold, premeditated escalation is applied.
The executive order
That’s why The New York Times‘ report from August 8, which revealed that US President Donald Trump had secretly signed an executive order to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against Latin American cartels classified as foreign terrorist organizations, did not go unnoticed.
The exclusive immediately linked to the accusations made days earlier by Rubio, who had been strongly insisting on the need to empower the military to act against these groups.
The former senator asserted that the US military had approval to take aggressive action against the cartels: “It allows us to now target what they’re operating and to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever—to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it.” He concluded:
“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug-dealing organizations.”
Following that, various media outlets reported a significant US military deployment in the region. Reuters reported that three Aegis guided-missile destroyers were apparently approaching the coast of Venezuela.
Rubio’s statements, in reality, are not surprising, as they fit his well-worn script. In fact, even though he doesn’t directly mention Venezuela or any other country in the region, it’s not necessary to perform a mathematical integral to understand what he’s getting at.
Force excuses
Rubio began laying out the roadmap from Guyana in March, following the disastrous debut of his first tour as US chief diplomat.
There, the official signed a security memorandum, seeking to lay the groundwork for future false flag operations against Venezuela and thus create pretexts for intervention. Rubio stated:
“If we have information that someone has entered your country [Guyana] who has bad intentions, we want to be able to share that with your government … if we have information on a Tren de Aragua gang member from Venezuela, we want to make sure that we’re—we have collaboration and we’re sharing that information. If we have information that some narcotrafficker is taking up shop here and has decided to try to turn this into a base of operation, which could become–could lead to violence and warfare here, gang warfare, we want to be able to share that with you.”
And, on the other hand, true to his aggressive rhetoric, he described Venezuela without evidence as a “narcotrafficking regime” with “illegitimate territorial claims” and warned, once again, that any action by Caracas against Georgetown or ExxonMobil would have “consequences.”
Guyana offers ideal conditions to serve as an outpost for Washington’s geopolitical interests in the region. The Cuban-American secretary, with his relentless focus on Caracas, has identified this enclave as an opportune front to fuel his destabilizing plan, and has articulated local alliances and prepared the ground for future pressure operations against the Venezuelan government.
On the other hand, in the catalog of necessary pretexts required by the US political class against Venezuela, it is recalled that in July the guilty plea of Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal before a federal court in New York added to the reissue of the “narco-state” agenda.
Carvajal, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine and narcoterrorism, is being portrayed as part of the “Cartel of the Suns.”
Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, this narrative is sustained by media coverage and judicial accusations, reinforced by confessions like Carvajal’s own.
Thus, the confession acts as a “legitimizing factor” that makes it easier for the US administration to take coercive action.
The media has played its part
The complicity between the small group led by Rubio and figures like María Corina Machado has aligned with the media disinformation machinery, contributing to the policy against Venezuela.
The media encouraged the pantomime of drug trafficking in the context of the “threat to national security”:
In January, Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times that Venezuela posed a threat to US national security, proposing “coercive diplomacy” and leaving open the option of using force.
In March, the New York Post published an article titled “FBI stepping up operations against cartel linked to Venezuela’s repressive Maduro regime,” reviving the old “Cartel of the Suns” narrative.
Meanwhile, Rubio found echoes in internal voices of the Venezuelan opposition, such as María Corina Machado, who, faithful to her political line clearly misaligned with national interests, went so far as to state:
“Who is Putin’s greatest ally in Latin America? Nicolás Maduro. Who is the Iranian regime’s greatest ally in Latin America? Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela is the only other country in the Western Hemisphere, besides the United States, that has the capability to build combat drones, obviously of Iranian origin.”
“Venezuela is hours away from Florida, not Tehran. That constitutes a real threat.”
“I want to be very clear: this has nothing to do with ‘regime change.’ This is not about changing a political regime. This is about dismantling a criminal structure that poses the greatest threat to the national security of the United States.”
Machado’s statements reflect a calculated irresponsibility, designed to fuel the threat narrative and support the interventionist agenda promoted by external actors. Her intention is to fuel the climate of alarm that Rubio seeks to instill in the Trump administration.
The events described are part of a carefully planned strategy aimed at creating a breeding ground that would justify US actions against Venezuela.
Every step, every statement and political maneuver ultimately resulted in the executive order of August 8, even though the groundwork had been laid long before, making it clear that the plan unequivocally bears Marco Rubio’s personal stamp.
The strategy of manipulation and pretext-building against Venezuela is accelerating in a strategic context favored by Rubio’s position in the White House.
So far, the naval deployment has not been officially confirmed—beyond media reports—but there is an executive order that, under the pretext of combating drug trafficking, authorizes the mobilization of forces in the region.
This measure did not arise in isolation: its turning point came in May, following the scandal surrounding then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and the reconfiguration of the administration’s internal ecosystem, which consolidated Rubio’s influence as Secretary of State and, on an interim basis, as National Security Adviser.
From that strategic position, Rubio expanded his capacity for action beyond diplomacy, directly influencing the US security architecture with international impact.
In broad terms, the logic of this agenda is reminiscent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the George W. Bush administration used the false testimony of “Curveball” to justify a military intervention based on nonexistent threats.
Although these accusations were proven false, the manipulation of information had already created the necessary framework for acting with apparent legitimacy.
In the Venezuelan case, the combination of judicial accusations, media operations, and strategic moves within the White House’s inner circle of influence demonstrates that this US administration is following a historical pattern.
https://orinocotribune.com/marco-rubios ... venezuela/
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Is Washington Trying to Build a “Coalition of the Willing” Against Venezuela?
Posted on August 29, 2025 by Nick Corbishley
Second question: does the “supposed” Cartel de los Soles actually exist?
Before we get to the meat of this article, which is really two articles in one, a quick recap (just in case some readers have been on a news-fast for the past three weeks). A few months ago, the US government designated the “SUPPOSED” (more on that later) “Cartel de los Soles” as a terrorist organisation, of which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is its alleged leader — alleged as in according to the US government.
In early August, the Trump Administration offered a $50 million reward, up from $25 million, for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro, accusing Venezuela of being a “narco state.” Shortly thereafter, the US announced the deployment of a missile cruiser, a submarine, and three amphibious ships carrying 4,500 troops to the Caribbean, under the pretext of intercepting drug trafficking networks.
There is no open talk of regime change though that is clearly the goal, as we noted in our post last Friday on the real reasons behind Washington’s latest show of force against Venezuela:
Anyone who believes or supports this latest pretext for war against a country the US has tried to regime change at least twice so far this century and which has been subject to more than a decade of crippling US sanctions is either exceptionally gullible or an apologist for empire.
The main real reason, of course, is oil. As the Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife says, Venezuela, once the ranchito of the Rockefeller family, is written with a capital “P” for “petroleo”. Indeed, even as Trump has ratcheted tensions with Venezuela, Chevron is still pumping Venezuelan oil and shipping it back to the US.
Other possible reasons include Venezuela’s close ties to China, Russia and Iran, the US’ three most important strategic rivals. As we noted in that post, the build-up of troops could also be part of a diversionary tactic as the Trump administration continues to reel from the Epstein scandal. This being Trump, it could also be just pure bluff or bluster. But it could also be the beginnings of something far more serious: another US-led military disaster.
In recent days, the Venezuelan government has mobilised no fewer than four million army reservists to defend “la patria“. Venezuelan Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López announced plans to reinforce the country’s anti-narcotics efforts through the deployment of military vessels and 15,000 troops to patrol the country’s “territorial waters.”
President Maduro said on Monday that all branches of Venezuela’s armed forces were prepared to defend the country. Thousands of civilians joined a voluntary militia enrolment drive in public squares over the past weekend.
At the international level, Venezuela’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations called on member states to demand an end to the US’ “hostile actions”. Some countries in the region, including Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Bolivia, have expressed alarm about the US’ deployment of so much naval hardware so close to Venezuelan waters.
Russia, China and Iran have also voiced their support for Maduro in recent days. China is estimated to have poured around $67 billion into Venezuela since 2007 and has a keen interest in the country’s oil supplies, whose exports have been severely curtailed by US sanctions.
The 11 member nations of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) unanimously condemned the US threat to regional stability. However, other governments in the region have sided with Washington and even offered up their land and waters for US troop movements.
France Joins the Ruckus
France has decided to join the ruckus by sending more ships to Guadeloupe, its overseas territory in the Caribbean. The Macron government claims its naval reinforcements are part of an international cooperation effort to regime change Venezuela against criminal networks in the area, and stressed the need to protect its overseas territories, in particular Guadeloupe and Martinique, which are often used as transit points for drug trafficking to Europe.
The move comes, ironically, as fears of a French government collapse send its borrowing costs soaring. In fact, one thing that all three of Europe’s largest economies, Germany, the UK and France, have in common is their growing financial pains.
Both France and the UK now have higher yields on their ten-year bonds than Spain and Greece, and their is even talk in both countries of the possible need for an IMF bailout. Meanwhile Germany’s Chancellor (and former BlackRock board member) Friedrich Merz has warned that Germany’s welfare state model is no longer sustainable. As Yves would say, quelle surprise!
Something else that unites the three countries is their governments’ determination to expand their military spending, at US insistence, despite their rapidly deteriorating finances. While French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou plans to freeze welfare payments, reduce pensioners’ benefits and abolish two national holidays, the one area where spending will dramatically increase is the military.
As the French government deplores the state of its finances at home, it is sending military vessels to the Caribbean to join the US’ latest act of imperial misadventure. Which invites the question: will other US client and vassal states in Europe and Latin America be doing the same in the coming days and weeks? Is the US trying to build a “coalition of the willing” against Venezuela, just as it did against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya with such disastrous consequences?
There are certainly moves in that direction. Trinidad and Tobago’s recently elected right-leaning government last week expressed its support for the US naval operation, noting that organized crime and drug trafficking pose a direct threat to the security of the entire Caribbean. Desperate to court favours in Washington, the government also offered up its waters and territory for US operations against Venezuela if Washington requests them — to defend neighbouring Guyana, of course.
The Essequibo Border Dispute
For its part, the Guyanese government has also called for the strengthening of cooperation against transnational organized crime and narco-terrorism, in direct reference to the criminal organisation Cartel of the Suns. The President of Guyana, Irfaan Ali, said last Saturday that his country is willing to take actions to defend its territory and sovereignty in the “new environment”.
This is a reference to the escalating border dispute between Guyana (formerly British Guyana) and Venezuela over the Essequibo, a 160,000 square-kilometre oil-soaked territory that is on track to become Exxon Mobil’s largest single source of revenue by the end of this decade and which the US, unsurprisingly, would like to turn into a military outpost. For Guyana, the huge oil discoveries could end up being as much as curse as a blessing, as the NYT reported last year:
The deal that made [Exxon’s success] ´possible — and which gave Exxon Mobil the bulk of the proceeds — has been a point of public outcry and even a lawsuit, with a seeming consensus that Guyana got the short end of the stick. But the deal has nonetheless generated $3.5 billion so far for the country, more money than it has ever seen, significantly more than it gained from conserving trees. It’s enough to chart a new destiny.
But that new destiny has already included escalating tensions with its much larger neighbour, Venezuela, and risks turning Guyana into another disposable pawn in the furtherance of US geostrategic interests in its direct neighbourhood. As we warned in November 2023, this centuries-old dispute in an oil-rich corner of South America has the potential to become the next geopolitical flashpoint:
Essequibo is not only rich in oil and gas; it boasts other mineral deposits, including Gold and Bauxite, as well as huge fish stocks and fresh water supplies, which a government minister even recently talked about exporting to other countries. As the Commander of US Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), General Laura Richardson, said in January, Latin America is home to 31% of the world’s fresh water.
But for the moment, it is Guyana’s vast untapped energy supplies that are of prime interest to US and global corporations. According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, Guyana’s coastal area has roughly 13.6 billion barrels of oil reserves and 32 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves waiting to be drilled. For a country with one of the lowest population densities on the planet and a GDP of slightly less than $10 billion, a bonanza awaits. But Caracas contends that the untapped energy supplies belong to Venezuela and that the arbitration panel that granted Guyana jurisdiction over Essequibo was rigged.
A Meagre Coalition So Far
So far, four countries in the region have designated the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organisation: the United States, Ecuador, Paraguay and Argentina. My guess is that Peru will be next in line. Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has already said that she has “not the slightest doubt” that Peru, like other countries in the region, will join this latest US-led charge against the Maduro government.
However, as coalitions go, this one is pretty meagre. One country that is missing is Colombia, which has played a key role in previous regime change attempts, including Juan Guaidó’s risible coup attempt in 2019. However, since the election of left-leaning Gustavo Petro as president in 2022, Colombia has tried to replace its alignment with the US with multilateral relations, even going so far as to join the BRICS’ New Development Bank and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
When Petro took the reins as president, diplomatic ties between Colombia and Venezuela were essentially on hold. Since then relations have gradually been re-established. In recent months Petro has even proposed building a confederation of nations with neighbouring countries (Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama) based on the former Greater Colombia that existed between 1819 and 1931 and comprised the four aforementioned countries.
It will be very interesting to see how Colombia responds to developments in Venezuela. A few days ago, Maduro announced the movement of 15,000 troops to Venezuela’s border with Colombia earlier this week. Then yesterday (Aug 28), Gustavo Petro announced the movement of 25,000 Colombian troops to the other side of that border, which has been greeted positively by the Maduro government.
This border region has long been a focal point of violent clashes between government forces (on both sides), insurgency and paramilitary groups. Lest we forget, Colombia is trying to put behind it 52 years of civil war. However, political violence is once again rearing its ugly head. A few weeks ago, the opposition politician Miguel Uribe finally succumbed to the injuries he sustained in an assassination attempt in mid-June.
In addition, a car bomb was recently set off next to a military base in Cali and a police helicopter downed in the town of Amalfi. In total, 19 people were killed and 65 injured in the two attacks. The car bomb explosion in Cali has been described by local media as the “worst terrorist attack” in the country since 2019, when ELN guerrillas staged a car bomb attack against the General Santander police school, in the south of Bogotá, leaving 21 dead.
Both attacks were attributed to dissident factions of the now-extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. President Petro described what happened as “a day of death.”
One can imagine Petro spending much of his time looking over his shoulder. Colombia is home to at least seven US military bases, and was until recently considered by many, including Hugo Chávez, as the Israel of Latin America. But Petro has tried to change that — first, by building alliances with other Global South countries, and second, by severing ties with Israel over its genocide in Gaza. In the process, he will have made lots of enemies, at home and abroad.
In July, audio recordings were released in which Petro’s former Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva could be heard talking about organising a coup against the Petro government. Israel is also stirring the pot, as the veteran journalist Gonzalo Guillén warned in a tweet yesterday,
Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime and the far right in general are promoting an irresponsible and fallacious narrative: that Hezbollah terrorism is hiding on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. This claim, besides being completely unsubstsantiated and absurd, clearly aims to ignite the region and destabilise both countries.
This accusation is entirely baseless and has serious geopolitical implications. They seek to generate chaos, confrontation, and destruction.
Does the Cartel de los Soles Actually Exist?
This is the question NC reader Veronius asked in a comment to our previous post on Venezuela.
According to Gustavo Petro, the answer is a definite “no”. “It is the fictitious excuse used by the far right to overthrow governments that do not obey them,” he wrote on X earlier this week. In so doing, he opened up an intriguing can of worms. According to three letter agencies in the US, there is more than sufficient evidence tying senior Venezuelan army commanders and senior members of the Maduro government to drug trafficking.
As far as I can tell, based on the limited information available to me, the answer to Veronius’ question is a big, fat maybe. But even if it does exist, it is not nearly as big a player in the global drugs trade as the Trump administration is making out — and certainly not as big a player as the US government.
According to the official story, propagated over the past decade or so by US government agencies and Western media, the Cartel de los Soles is a loose-knit network of Venezuelan generals and politicians that are involved in drug trafficking, in alliance with Colombian and Mexican cartels. It purportedly came into existence some time in the ’90s when army officials began taking kickbacks from Colombian cartels. The name apparently comes from the emblems that looked like suns on the generals’ uniforms.
To date, the US has prosecuted two Venezuelan generals on charges relating to drug trafficking. In the most recent case, Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former head of military intelligence in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s government, who just last month pled guilty to trafficking cocaine to the US in a narcoterrorism conspiracy.
As the journalist Antonio Maria Delgado reported in the Miami Herald, Carvajal also claims to have evidence about Venezuela’s involvement with Iran and Colombia’s FARC, espionage within the US, and Maduro’s ties with the gang Tren de Aragua, which serves as a “paramilitary arm of the state”. However, as Delgado notes, “Carvajal has a history of shifting loyalties and politically motivated statements”.
Of course, the idea of army generals taking kickbacks from drug trafficking organisations is utterly credible. It happens all over the world. Whether in Mexico, Afghanistan, Myanmar or Colombia, wherever large volumes of drugs are being cultivated, processed, or distributed, you can rest assured that some (often senior) army officers are getting a cut of the action for looking the other way, or even for helping with the distribution. A perfect case in point:
Money and Power
Ultimately, this is about money and power. The drugs trade is one of the most profitable business sectors on the planet, just like bootlegging was during the prohibition era in the US.
“Cocaine is a merchandise that is sold everywhere in the world, all the time,” Italian journalist and bestselling author of Gomorra, Roberto Saviano told the Spanish documentary programme Salvados in 2014. “I used the expression [in my book Zero, Zero, Zero] ‘governs the world’ because the data are astonishing: More than $400 billion of revenue per year… If I invested $1,000 in Apple shares, in one year I would make back around $1,200, $1,500. If I invested the same amount in cocaine, I could make back $182,000. That’s the power of cocaine.”
If you’re a heavily sanctioned country like Venezuela, such quick, easy money, all in hard US currency, could come in handy. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Cartel de los Soles is a real, organised, structured entity — as opposed to encompassing the widespread practice of people in positions of power lining their pockets with drugs money. Even many Western media outlets admit that the alliance is a loose, fragmented structure — nothing like the hierarchical structures of the Mexican and Colombian cartels.
As Venezuela Analysis notes, reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) itself state that less than 10% of US-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela and the Eastern Caribbean corridor:
A 2020 document from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) by Venezuelan government critics Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde concluded that the country “is not a primary transit country for US-bound cocaine” and that the bulk of drug shipments reach US territory via Washington-allied countries in Central America.
In more recent years, Ecuador has become a major transit point for cocaine, with some reports suggesting that as much as 70% of the global cocaine supply passing through the country.
Another cause for suspicion regarding the official narrative around the Cartel de los Soles is the fact that it does not merit a single mention in the DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment from last year. Nor is it mentioned in previous editions I’ve checked. Even in the 2025 edition, which was written under the Trump administration, “Cartel de los Soles” does not appear once while “Venezuela” is mentioned six times, but only in relation to Tren de Aragua, the other cartel that the Trump administration has designated as an international terrorist organisation.
If it is such a threat, why doesn’t it feature once in the DEA’s threat assessment? This seems like a reasonable question given we are now being told that Los Soles is a major player in the global drugs supply chain — so much so that the US is claiming it as justification for sending an armada to Venezuelan shores.
Lastly, something else that caught my eye in conducting research for this article was Wikipedia’s Spanish-language page on the Cartel de los Soles. On Google Search, the blurb below the title, which should match the first line or two of text on the corresponding Wikipedia page, reads as follows (translation and emphasis my own):
The Cartel de los Soles is a supposed criminal and terrorist organisation led, according to the President of the United States, by senior military officers…
In other words, there still appears to be doubts about its existence, and the claim that the “supposed” cartel is led by Venezuelan senior military officers is sourced directly from the US government. However, if you click on the link, here’s what you see:
Translation (emphasis my own): The Cartel of the Suns is an illicit, criminal, and terrorist organization headed by high-ranking members of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces since the 1990s, according to some media outlets,[1] whose objective is primarily cocaine trafficking,[2] fuel smuggling,[3][4] control of illegal mining activity in several states of Venezuela, with direct participation in the extraction and smuggling of gold, coltan, precious stones and other minerals. [5]
In other words, not only has the qualifier “supposed” been edited out of the text, expelling all doubt from readers’ minds, but also the reference to the US president as the primary source for the claim that the “supposed” cartel is led by senior military commanders of Venezuela’s armed forces. In its place as the new source for the information is “some media outlets”. And that, it seems, is how consent for US military operations is manufactured in today’s digital world.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08 ... zuela.html
August 29, 2025
Aerial view of USS New Orleans leading the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Rafael Peralta in formation, during a patrol in international waters in the East China Sea, May 24, 2020. Photo: US Navy/File photo.
The US empire has not ruled out the possibility of using military force against Venezuela, according to statements made by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
During a press conference this Thursday, August 28, Leavitt answered a question about whether President Donald Trump was considering launching military strikes against the Venezuelan territory, stating that the president “is willing to use all” of his country’s resources to “stop the flow of drugs.”
“I won’t pre-empt the president on any military action or related issues,” she added. “But what I will tell you is that many nations in the Caribbean and the region have applauded this administration’s counter-drug operations and efforts.”
Leavitt further stated that the president of the US empire “is prepared to use every element of [US imperial] power to prevent drugs from flooding our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”
“It is the highest responsibility of this president and this administration,” she insisted, “to prevent the illicit flow of drugs into our country and protect citizens from these deadly poisons.”
It is worth noting that Leavitt opted to ignore the absence of evidence for her claims and the lengthy involvement of the US empire in trafficking drugs through Latin America in utilizing it as a pretext for colonial interference and warmongering.
Rising tensions
In the last month, already strained relations between the US empire and Venezuela deteriorated further after the attorney general of the US entity, Pam Bondi, announced an increase from US$25 million to US$50 million in the bounty offered for information leading to the “capture” of President Maduro, whom Washington accuses without evidence of leading several drug cartels.
The situation escalated further after the confirmation of the deployment of US colonial military forces to the southern Caribbean Sea to supposedly combat international drug trafficking, without providing precise details about the scope, duration, or locations of operations.
This raised alarm bells and prompted statements from several leaders, both in the region and beyond, who interpreted the stated objective as a pretext to violate Venezuelan or third-party sovereignty and undermine regional peace.
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino noted that fake news is being spread portraying his country as a narco-state, which is inconsistent with reality and is a weapon used “to force an internal breakdown.”
Caracas’ reaction
In a recent speech, President Maduro announced a “special plan” to mobilize five million militia members “throughout the national territory,” in response to threats from the US empire. These operations took place last weekend, and the president announced this Monday that two new training sessions will be held to defend the country’s sovereignty in the face of the US empire’s military deployment in the southern Caribbean.
Meanwhile, countries such as México, Colombia, Honduras, Bolivia, Cuba, Russia, China, Belarus, and Iran have all condemned the possibility of Washington opening a war front in South America under the pretext of fighting drug trafficking. President Maduro has also publicly expressed his gratitude for the displays of solidarity his country has received from other governments in response to US imperialist threats.
https://orinocotribune.com/white-house- ... venezuela/
Marco Rubio’s Fingerprints on Washington’s Agenda Against Venezuela
August 27, 2025
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.
By Misión Verdad – Aug 25, 2025
Marco Rubio is one of the main architects of the offensive against Venezuela, to the point of having his obsessive personal agenda gain traction in the White House. His actions reveal a sustained calculation that has influenced presidential decisions.
The aforementioned has deliberately intensified the rhetoric that seeks to portray Venezuela as a threat to regional security.
Although this narrative is not new, the strategy combines media accusations with the dissemination of topics such as the “Aragua Train,” the re-creation of the “Cartel of the Suns,” and the constant promotion of false flag operations at the borders, all designed to amplify the perception of danger.
These elements function as a “spark moment,” deliberately constructed to capture President Donald Trump’s attention and pressure him to prioritize the Venezuela agenda.
This is a basic and well-known plan: the United States has historically used anti-drug rhetoric as a justification for interventions in Latin America.
Since Nixon’s declaration of the “war on drugs” in the late 1960s, the US government has used this framework to intervene politically, economically, covertly, and sometimes militarily in countries such as Panama and Grenada.
In the Venezuelan case, this manual applies because the idea that the country constitutes a “real danger” to international security gets normalized, and once this perception has taken hold, premeditated escalation is applied.
The executive order
That’s why The New York Times‘ report from August 8, which revealed that US President Donald Trump had secretly signed an executive order to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against Latin American cartels classified as foreign terrorist organizations, did not go unnoticed.
The exclusive immediately linked to the accusations made days earlier by Rubio, who had been strongly insisting on the need to empower the military to act against these groups.
The former senator asserted that the US military had approval to take aggressive action against the cartels: “It allows us to now target what they’re operating and to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever—to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it.” He concluded:
“We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug-dealing organizations.”
Following that, various media outlets reported a significant US military deployment in the region. Reuters reported that three Aegis guided-missile destroyers were apparently approaching the coast of Venezuela.
Rubio’s statements, in reality, are not surprising, as they fit his well-worn script. In fact, even though he doesn’t directly mention Venezuela or any other country in the region, it’s not necessary to perform a mathematical integral to understand what he’s getting at.
Force excuses
Rubio began laying out the roadmap from Guyana in March, following the disastrous debut of his first tour as US chief diplomat.
There, the official signed a security memorandum, seeking to lay the groundwork for future false flag operations against Venezuela and thus create pretexts for intervention. Rubio stated:
“If we have information that someone has entered your country [Guyana] who has bad intentions, we want to be able to share that with your government … if we have information on a Tren de Aragua gang member from Venezuela, we want to make sure that we’re—we have collaboration and we’re sharing that information. If we have information that some narcotrafficker is taking up shop here and has decided to try to turn this into a base of operation, which could become–could lead to violence and warfare here, gang warfare, we want to be able to share that with you.”
And, on the other hand, true to his aggressive rhetoric, he described Venezuela without evidence as a “narcotrafficking regime” with “illegitimate territorial claims” and warned, once again, that any action by Caracas against Georgetown or ExxonMobil would have “consequences.”
Guyana offers ideal conditions to serve as an outpost for Washington’s geopolitical interests in the region. The Cuban-American secretary, with his relentless focus on Caracas, has identified this enclave as an opportune front to fuel his destabilizing plan, and has articulated local alliances and prepared the ground for future pressure operations against the Venezuelan government.
On the other hand, in the catalog of necessary pretexts required by the US political class against Venezuela, it is recalled that in July the guilty plea of Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal before a federal court in New York added to the reissue of the “narco-state” agenda.
Carvajal, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to import cocaine and narcoterrorism, is being portrayed as part of the “Cartel of the Suns.”
Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, this narrative is sustained by media coverage and judicial accusations, reinforced by confessions like Carvajal’s own.
Thus, the confession acts as a “legitimizing factor” that makes it easier for the US administration to take coercive action.
The media has played its part
The complicity between the small group led by Rubio and figures like María Corina Machado has aligned with the media disinformation machinery, contributing to the policy against Venezuela.
The media encouraged the pantomime of drug trafficking in the context of the “threat to national security”:
In January, Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times that Venezuela posed a threat to US national security, proposing “coercive diplomacy” and leaving open the option of using force.
In March, the New York Post published an article titled “FBI stepping up operations against cartel linked to Venezuela’s repressive Maduro regime,” reviving the old “Cartel of the Suns” narrative.
Meanwhile, Rubio found echoes in internal voices of the Venezuelan opposition, such as María Corina Machado, who, faithful to her political line clearly misaligned with national interests, went so far as to state:
“Who is Putin’s greatest ally in Latin America? Nicolás Maduro. Who is the Iranian regime’s greatest ally in Latin America? Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela is the only other country in the Western Hemisphere, besides the United States, that has the capability to build combat drones, obviously of Iranian origin.”
“Venezuela is hours away from Florida, not Tehran. That constitutes a real threat.”
“I want to be very clear: this has nothing to do with ‘regime change.’ This is not about changing a political regime. This is about dismantling a criminal structure that poses the greatest threat to the national security of the United States.”
Machado’s statements reflect a calculated irresponsibility, designed to fuel the threat narrative and support the interventionist agenda promoted by external actors. Her intention is to fuel the climate of alarm that Rubio seeks to instill in the Trump administration.
The events described are part of a carefully planned strategy aimed at creating a breeding ground that would justify US actions against Venezuela.
Every step, every statement and political maneuver ultimately resulted in the executive order of August 8, even though the groundwork had been laid long before, making it clear that the plan unequivocally bears Marco Rubio’s personal stamp.
The strategy of manipulation and pretext-building against Venezuela is accelerating in a strategic context favored by Rubio’s position in the White House.
So far, the naval deployment has not been officially confirmed—beyond media reports—but there is an executive order that, under the pretext of combating drug trafficking, authorizes the mobilization of forces in the region.
This measure did not arise in isolation: its turning point came in May, following the scandal surrounding then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and the reconfiguration of the administration’s internal ecosystem, which consolidated Rubio’s influence as Secretary of State and, on an interim basis, as National Security Adviser.
From that strategic position, Rubio expanded his capacity for action beyond diplomacy, directly influencing the US security architecture with international impact.
In broad terms, the logic of this agenda is reminiscent of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the George W. Bush administration used the false testimony of “Curveball” to justify a military intervention based on nonexistent threats.
Although these accusations were proven false, the manipulation of information had already created the necessary framework for acting with apparent legitimacy.
In the Venezuelan case, the combination of judicial accusations, media operations, and strategic moves within the White House’s inner circle of influence demonstrates that this US administration is following a historical pattern.
https://orinocotribune.com/marco-rubios ... venezuela/
*****
Is Washington Trying to Build a “Coalition of the Willing” Against Venezuela?
Posted on August 29, 2025 by Nick Corbishley
Second question: does the “supposed” Cartel de los Soles actually exist?
Before we get to the meat of this article, which is really two articles in one, a quick recap (just in case some readers have been on a news-fast for the past three weeks). A few months ago, the US government designated the “SUPPOSED” (more on that later) “Cartel de los Soles” as a terrorist organisation, of which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is its alleged leader — alleged as in according to the US government.
In early August, the Trump Administration offered a $50 million reward, up from $25 million, for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro, accusing Venezuela of being a “narco state.” Shortly thereafter, the US announced the deployment of a missile cruiser, a submarine, and three amphibious ships carrying 4,500 troops to the Caribbean, under the pretext of intercepting drug trafficking networks.
There is no open talk of regime change though that is clearly the goal, as we noted in our post last Friday on the real reasons behind Washington’s latest show of force against Venezuela:
Anyone who believes or supports this latest pretext for war against a country the US has tried to regime change at least twice so far this century and which has been subject to more than a decade of crippling US sanctions is either exceptionally gullible or an apologist for empire.
The main real reason, of course, is oil. As the Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife says, Venezuela, once the ranchito of the Rockefeller family, is written with a capital “P” for “petroleo”. Indeed, even as Trump has ratcheted tensions with Venezuela, Chevron is still pumping Venezuelan oil and shipping it back to the US.
Other possible reasons include Venezuela’s close ties to China, Russia and Iran, the US’ three most important strategic rivals. As we noted in that post, the build-up of troops could also be part of a diversionary tactic as the Trump administration continues to reel from the Epstein scandal. This being Trump, it could also be just pure bluff or bluster. But it could also be the beginnings of something far more serious: another US-led military disaster.
In recent days, the Venezuelan government has mobilised no fewer than four million army reservists to defend “la patria“. Venezuelan Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López announced plans to reinforce the country’s anti-narcotics efforts through the deployment of military vessels and 15,000 troops to patrol the country’s “territorial waters.”
President Maduro said on Monday that all branches of Venezuela’s armed forces were prepared to defend the country. Thousands of civilians joined a voluntary militia enrolment drive in public squares over the past weekend.
At the international level, Venezuela’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations called on member states to demand an end to the US’ “hostile actions”. Some countries in the region, including Colombia, Mexico, Brazil and Bolivia, have expressed alarm about the US’ deployment of so much naval hardware so close to Venezuelan waters.
Russia, China and Iran have also voiced their support for Maduro in recent days. China is estimated to have poured around $67 billion into Venezuela since 2007 and has a keen interest in the country’s oil supplies, whose exports have been severely curtailed by US sanctions.
The 11 member nations of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA-TCP) unanimously condemned the US threat to regional stability. However, other governments in the region have sided with Washington and even offered up their land and waters for US troop movements.
France Joins the Ruckus
France has decided to join the ruckus by sending more ships to Guadeloupe, its overseas territory in the Caribbean. The Macron government claims its naval reinforcements are part of an international cooperation effort to regime change Venezuela against criminal networks in the area, and stressed the need to protect its overseas territories, in particular Guadeloupe and Martinique, which are often used as transit points for drug trafficking to Europe.
The move comes, ironically, as fears of a French government collapse send its borrowing costs soaring. In fact, one thing that all three of Europe’s largest economies, Germany, the UK and France, have in common is their growing financial pains.
Both France and the UK now have higher yields on their ten-year bonds than Spain and Greece, and their is even talk in both countries of the possible need for an IMF bailout. Meanwhile Germany’s Chancellor (and former BlackRock board member) Friedrich Merz has warned that Germany’s welfare state model is no longer sustainable. As Yves would say, quelle surprise!
Something else that unites the three countries is their governments’ determination to expand their military spending, at US insistence, despite their rapidly deteriorating finances. While French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou plans to freeze welfare payments, reduce pensioners’ benefits and abolish two national holidays, the one area where spending will dramatically increase is the military.
As the French government deplores the state of its finances at home, it is sending military vessels to the Caribbean to join the US’ latest act of imperial misadventure. Which invites the question: will other US client and vassal states in Europe and Latin America be doing the same in the coming days and weeks? Is the US trying to build a “coalition of the willing” against Venezuela, just as it did against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya with such disastrous consequences?
There are certainly moves in that direction. Trinidad and Tobago’s recently elected right-leaning government last week expressed its support for the US naval operation, noting that organized crime and drug trafficking pose a direct threat to the security of the entire Caribbean. Desperate to court favours in Washington, the government also offered up its waters and territory for US operations against Venezuela if Washington requests them — to defend neighbouring Guyana, of course.
The Essequibo Border Dispute
For its part, the Guyanese government has also called for the strengthening of cooperation against transnational organized crime and narco-terrorism, in direct reference to the criminal organisation Cartel of the Suns. The President of Guyana, Irfaan Ali, said last Saturday that his country is willing to take actions to defend its territory and sovereignty in the “new environment”.
This is a reference to the escalating border dispute between Guyana (formerly British Guyana) and Venezuela over the Essequibo, a 160,000 square-kilometre oil-soaked territory that is on track to become Exxon Mobil’s largest single source of revenue by the end of this decade and which the US, unsurprisingly, would like to turn into a military outpost. For Guyana, the huge oil discoveries could end up being as much as curse as a blessing, as the NYT reported last year:
The deal that made [Exxon’s success] ´possible — and which gave Exxon Mobil the bulk of the proceeds — has been a point of public outcry and even a lawsuit, with a seeming consensus that Guyana got the short end of the stick. But the deal has nonetheless generated $3.5 billion so far for the country, more money than it has ever seen, significantly more than it gained from conserving trees. It’s enough to chart a new destiny.
But that new destiny has already included escalating tensions with its much larger neighbour, Venezuela, and risks turning Guyana into another disposable pawn in the furtherance of US geostrategic interests in its direct neighbourhood. As we warned in November 2023, this centuries-old dispute in an oil-rich corner of South America has the potential to become the next geopolitical flashpoint:
Essequibo is not only rich in oil and gas; it boasts other mineral deposits, including Gold and Bauxite, as well as huge fish stocks and fresh water supplies, which a government minister even recently talked about exporting to other countries. As the Commander of US Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), General Laura Richardson, said in January, Latin America is home to 31% of the world’s fresh water.
But for the moment, it is Guyana’s vast untapped energy supplies that are of prime interest to US and global corporations. According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, Guyana’s coastal area has roughly 13.6 billion barrels of oil reserves and 32 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves waiting to be drilled. For a country with one of the lowest population densities on the planet and a GDP of slightly less than $10 billion, a bonanza awaits. But Caracas contends that the untapped energy supplies belong to Venezuela and that the arbitration panel that granted Guyana jurisdiction over Essequibo was rigged.
A Meagre Coalition So Far
So far, four countries in the region have designated the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organisation: the United States, Ecuador, Paraguay and Argentina. My guess is that Peru will be next in line. Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has already said that she has “not the slightest doubt” that Peru, like other countries in the region, will join this latest US-led charge against the Maduro government.
However, as coalitions go, this one is pretty meagre. One country that is missing is Colombia, which has played a key role in previous regime change attempts, including Juan Guaidó’s risible coup attempt in 2019. However, since the election of left-leaning Gustavo Petro as president in 2022, Colombia has tried to replace its alignment with the US with multilateral relations, even going so far as to join the BRICS’ New Development Bank and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
When Petro took the reins as president, diplomatic ties between Colombia and Venezuela were essentially on hold. Since then relations have gradually been re-established. In recent months Petro has even proposed building a confederation of nations with neighbouring countries (Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama) based on the former Greater Colombia that existed between 1819 and 1931 and comprised the four aforementioned countries.
It will be very interesting to see how Colombia responds to developments in Venezuela. A few days ago, Maduro announced the movement of 15,000 troops to Venezuela’s border with Colombia earlier this week. Then yesterday (Aug 28), Gustavo Petro announced the movement of 25,000 Colombian troops to the other side of that border, which has been greeted positively by the Maduro government.
This border region has long been a focal point of violent clashes between government forces (on both sides), insurgency and paramilitary groups. Lest we forget, Colombia is trying to put behind it 52 years of civil war. However, political violence is once again rearing its ugly head. A few weeks ago, the opposition politician Miguel Uribe finally succumbed to the injuries he sustained in an assassination attempt in mid-June.
In addition, a car bomb was recently set off next to a military base in Cali and a police helicopter downed in the town of Amalfi. In total, 19 people were killed and 65 injured in the two attacks. The car bomb explosion in Cali has been described by local media as the “worst terrorist attack” in the country since 2019, when ELN guerrillas staged a car bomb attack against the General Santander police school, in the south of Bogotá, leaving 21 dead.
Both attacks were attributed to dissident factions of the now-extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. President Petro described what happened as “a day of death.”
One can imagine Petro spending much of his time looking over his shoulder. Colombia is home to at least seven US military bases, and was until recently considered by many, including Hugo Chávez, as the Israel of Latin America. But Petro has tried to change that — first, by building alliances with other Global South countries, and second, by severing ties with Israel over its genocide in Gaza. In the process, he will have made lots of enemies, at home and abroad.
In July, audio recordings were released in which Petro’s former Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva could be heard talking about organising a coup against the Petro government. Israel is also stirring the pot, as the veteran journalist Gonzalo Guillén warned in a tweet yesterday,
Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime and the far right in general are promoting an irresponsible and fallacious narrative: that Hezbollah terrorism is hiding on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. This claim, besides being completely unsubstsantiated and absurd, clearly aims to ignite the region and destabilise both countries.
This accusation is entirely baseless and has serious geopolitical implications. They seek to generate chaos, confrontation, and destruction.
Does the Cartel de los Soles Actually Exist?
This is the question NC reader Veronius asked in a comment to our previous post on Venezuela.
According to Gustavo Petro, the answer is a definite “no”. “It is the fictitious excuse used by the far right to overthrow governments that do not obey them,” he wrote on X earlier this week. In so doing, he opened up an intriguing can of worms. According to three letter agencies in the US, there is more than sufficient evidence tying senior Venezuelan army commanders and senior members of the Maduro government to drug trafficking.
As far as I can tell, based on the limited information available to me, the answer to Veronius’ question is a big, fat maybe. But even if it does exist, it is not nearly as big a player in the global drugs trade as the Trump administration is making out — and certainly not as big a player as the US government.
According to the official story, propagated over the past decade or so by US government agencies and Western media, the Cartel de los Soles is a loose-knit network of Venezuelan generals and politicians that are involved in drug trafficking, in alliance with Colombian and Mexican cartels. It purportedly came into existence some time in the ’90s when army officials began taking kickbacks from Colombian cartels. The name apparently comes from the emblems that looked like suns on the generals’ uniforms.
To date, the US has prosecuted two Venezuelan generals on charges relating to drug trafficking. In the most recent case, Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former head of military intelligence in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s government, who just last month pled guilty to trafficking cocaine to the US in a narcoterrorism conspiracy.
As the journalist Antonio Maria Delgado reported in the Miami Herald, Carvajal also claims to have evidence about Venezuela’s involvement with Iran and Colombia’s FARC, espionage within the US, and Maduro’s ties with the gang Tren de Aragua, which serves as a “paramilitary arm of the state”. However, as Delgado notes, “Carvajal has a history of shifting loyalties and politically motivated statements”.
Of course, the idea of army generals taking kickbacks from drug trafficking organisations is utterly credible. It happens all over the world. Whether in Mexico, Afghanistan, Myanmar or Colombia, wherever large volumes of drugs are being cultivated, processed, or distributed, you can rest assured that some (often senior) army officers are getting a cut of the action for looking the other way, or even for helping with the distribution. A perfect case in point:
Money and Power
Ultimately, this is about money and power. The drugs trade is one of the most profitable business sectors on the planet, just like bootlegging was during the prohibition era in the US.
“Cocaine is a merchandise that is sold everywhere in the world, all the time,” Italian journalist and bestselling author of Gomorra, Roberto Saviano told the Spanish documentary programme Salvados in 2014. “I used the expression [in my book Zero, Zero, Zero] ‘governs the world’ because the data are astonishing: More than $400 billion of revenue per year… If I invested $1,000 in Apple shares, in one year I would make back around $1,200, $1,500. If I invested the same amount in cocaine, I could make back $182,000. That’s the power of cocaine.”
If you’re a heavily sanctioned country like Venezuela, such quick, easy money, all in hard US currency, could come in handy. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Cartel de los Soles is a real, organised, structured entity — as opposed to encompassing the widespread practice of people in positions of power lining their pockets with drugs money. Even many Western media outlets admit that the alliance is a loose, fragmented structure — nothing like the hierarchical structures of the Mexican and Colombian cartels.
As Venezuela Analysis notes, reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) itself state that less than 10% of US-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela and the Eastern Caribbean corridor:
A 2020 document from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) by Venezuelan government critics Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde concluded that the country “is not a primary transit country for US-bound cocaine” and that the bulk of drug shipments reach US territory via Washington-allied countries in Central America.
In more recent years, Ecuador has become a major transit point for cocaine, with some reports suggesting that as much as 70% of the global cocaine supply passing through the country.
Another cause for suspicion regarding the official narrative around the Cartel de los Soles is the fact that it does not merit a single mention in the DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment from last year. Nor is it mentioned in previous editions I’ve checked. Even in the 2025 edition, which was written under the Trump administration, “Cartel de los Soles” does not appear once while “Venezuela” is mentioned six times, but only in relation to Tren de Aragua, the other cartel that the Trump administration has designated as an international terrorist organisation.
If it is such a threat, why doesn’t it feature once in the DEA’s threat assessment? This seems like a reasonable question given we are now being told that Los Soles is a major player in the global drugs supply chain — so much so that the US is claiming it as justification for sending an armada to Venezuelan shores.
Lastly, something else that caught my eye in conducting research for this article was Wikipedia’s Spanish-language page on the Cartel de los Soles. On Google Search, the blurb below the title, which should match the first line or two of text on the corresponding Wikipedia page, reads as follows (translation and emphasis my own):
The Cartel de los Soles is a supposed criminal and terrorist organisation led, according to the President of the United States, by senior military officers…
In other words, there still appears to be doubts about its existence, and the claim that the “supposed” cartel is led by Venezuelan senior military officers is sourced directly from the US government. However, if you click on the link, here’s what you see:
Translation (emphasis my own): The Cartel of the Suns is an illicit, criminal, and terrorist organization headed by high-ranking members of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces since the 1990s, according to some media outlets,[1] whose objective is primarily cocaine trafficking,[2] fuel smuggling,[3][4] control of illegal mining activity in several states of Venezuela, with direct participation in the extraction and smuggling of gold, coltan, precious stones and other minerals. [5]
In other words, not only has the qualifier “supposed” been edited out of the text, expelling all doubt from readers’ minds, but also the reference to the US president as the primary source for the claim that the “supposed” cartel is led by senior military commanders of Venezuela’s armed forces. In its place as the new source for the information is “some media outlets”. And that, it seems, is how consent for US military operations is manufactured in today’s digital world.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/08 ... zuela.html
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
A Funny Thing Happened to US Warships on Their Way to The Caribbean: The Invasion That Wasn’t
August 30, 2025
US Marines boarding a helicopter. Photo: File photo.
By Maria Páez Victor – Aug 28, 2025
The USA has deployed two warships, an armed nuclear submarine and 4,500 troops to the Caribbean Sea. According to Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, their supposed mission is to combat drug trafficking and a drug cartel called “Cartel de los Soles” [Cartel of the Sun’s]. Rubio claims that it is led by President Maduro, and he insists that it is intent on “flooding” the US with narcotics. He stated that this cartel is one of the largest criminal organizations that exists in the hemisphere.
Military experts, however, point out that two warships and a nuclear submarine is overkill and ineffective to combat smugglers’ boats, for which helicopters and coast-guard-type ships would be more effective. Furthermore, as a potential invasion, 4,500 troops is woefully inadequate for invading a country the size of Venezuela. The US needed 26,000 troops to invade Panama, 110,000 to invade Afghanistan, and 130,000 to invade Iraq, all with very mixed results.
No drugs in Venezuela
Furthermore, drugs and this “cartel” are poorly concocted excuses to attack Venezuela. Washington has no evidence whatsoever of the existence of this criminal organization. Pino Arlacchi, Under-secretary General of the UN and Executive Director of the UN program against drugs UNODC, has categorically stated that: “the UN 2025 report dismantles piece by piece the geopolitical fabrication built about the ‘Cartel of the Suns,’ an entity as legendary as the Loch Ness Monster (1).”
In regards to Venezuela being a drug nation, that is also pure fantasy. The 2025 UN drug report states that the Venezuelan government’s fight against drugs has been exemplary, that 30 previous annual reports do not even mention Venezuelan drug trafficking because it does not exist, that most of the drugs that go north do so through the Pacific Ocean not the Caribbean Sea, and that only 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela. Arlacchi recently mentions that 57% of the banana containers leaving Ecuador and arriving in Europe are loaded with cocaine. Colombia produces more than 70% of the world’s cocaine; meanwhile, in Venezuela, there is no coca growing.
Even a 2020 report made by critics of the Venezuelan government, Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), concluded that the country “is not a primary transit country for US-bound cocaine” and that the bulk of drug shipments reach US territory via Washington-allied countries in Central America.
The hypocrisy of Washington is appalling. The US imports, sells, buys, and consumes the most cocaine in the world. Its cities and towns are filled with addicts, and its drug-induced crime is at unbelievable levels. The US has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the world. Why not go after the US drug cartels and distributors?
There is no mistake: the warships are intended to threaten the Venezuelan government and create chaos and psychological terror in the population.
Mind games
Most people have not heard of this military deployment, unless they live in Miami, because the mainstream media has largely ignored it. Not so with social media, which has exploded with the news and prognostications of an imminent invasion of Venezuela, the seizure of its president (on whom the US has set a bounty on his head of $50 million!), and the fall of its government by military force. The Miami based ultra-right extremists have had a field day, building up psychological terror and touting what they wish but cannot assure.
World attention, however, has had other fish to fry: the Russia/Ukraine conflict, the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s tariff attacks on the world economy, and inside the USA, the elusive Epstein File, the military takeover of Washington DC, the attempts to rig electoral districts, and the continuing jailing and deporting of immigrants. Trump has quite an agenda already. To add Venezuela to it, he would have to kiss his desired Nobel Peace Prize goodbye if he attacked a Latin American country.
And that is exactly what Marco Rubio, with his sick, ruthless obsession against Cuba and Venezuela wants: to bring Venezuela to the top of Trump’s agenda. He thinks this would be the “making” of him, but more likely, which he does not realize, it will be his utter downfall.
Impacts of the military threat
It seems that in the US, nobody in the top political or military echelons plays chess. There does not seem to be any consideration when they make a move of what their opponent will do. In Venezuela, there were several responses to this military threat:
Taking the threat seriously; Venezuela quickly deployed its comprehensive defense shield, which is formidable. The country has the most powerful armed forces in Latin America, the only one capable of high-intensity conflict. Its military technology is cutting edge, Russian built, with a sophisticated, potent, air defense system having short, medium, and long-range capacity. The Venezuelan armed forces, therefore, took up defensive positions immediately for all the world to see.
There are 4.5 million people in the militias in Venezuela, which form part of the armed forces. These civilians have been trained, prepared, and armed. Last weekend, the government opened registration for anyone who wished to join the militias in defending their homeland, and the response of many thousands throughout the nation was overwhelming. The people, therefore, are armed, and are in close cooperation with its military.
There is a political unity never seen before. Venezuelans of every stripe are incensed at the US affront. In a country where the opposition rarely, if at all, praises the government, its diverse members have rallied around the government and unified in defense of the nation. President Maduro’s political situation has been strengthened in an extraordinary manner.
International support for Venezuela
Perhaps because Trump has fired his top military intelligence officer, the US has misread the Latin American geopolitical situation badly: it can no longer claim Latin America as its back yard. Venezuela is not confronting this threat alone.
Washington does not appear to realize that times have changed. It is truly a multipolar world; the US cannot lord it over Latin America as it used to. This is a different world from the time when the US could berate, intimidate, bribe, harass, carry out assassinations, depose governments, and invade Latin American countries as it did before.
Russia and China, both with substantial investments in Venezuela, have told Washington quite clearly to stop threatening Venezuela, saying that the US does not “own” the Caribbean. Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Belarus, Iran, Brazil, and Turkey are some of the nations that have stated their support for Venezuela. Three significant supports are worth mentioning:
The Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has categorically denounced the illegality of the US military presence and threat, saying: “We are never going to support the intervention by a foreign government in a sovereign country.”
The BRIC nations, the new geopolitical organization that has more than half the world in its axis, has backed Venezuela.
The Colombian president Gustavo Petro has announced that, “if Venezuela is attacked, the armed forces of Colombia will unite with the Venezuelan army to fight the invaders.” This unity of armies has not happened since the time of Simón Bolívar in the 19th Century, when the Venezuelan and Colombian armies were one, and together they liberated the continent of the Spanish empire. These were historic and profound words of President Petro. The combined armies would be formidable indeed against a US invasion.
Throughout years of continuous attacks and sanctions, Venezuela has carried out an exemplary diplomatic effort that has paid off. The majority of UN members have regularly supported Venezuela, and stronger links to China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran—other sanctioned nations—have also been a source of support and solidarity.
Venezuelans will no doubt be bolstering their hopes remembering the triumphs of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the Afghani and Vietnamese peasantry who withstood attacks, saving their respective countries. But wars exact great costs and loss of life, so it is best to avoid them altogether. Maybe one was averted in these days because Venezuela has followed the saying of the Roman, Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, prepare for war). Venezuela was and is prepared to face the invaders.
Venezuela has never attacked or threatened any other nation. It has never gone to war against any neighbour. It has always striven for peace for its land and people. President Maduro in his call for national unity said: “It is time for courage, for uniting efforts, and for putting aside minor differences, to speak with one voice, the voice of the homeland.” Venezuelans have heeded his words.
Notes
1.“The Great Deception Against Venezuela: Oil Geopolitics Disguised as War on Drugs” by Pino Arlacchi.
https://orinocotribune.com/a-funny-thin ... hat-wasnt/
August 30, 2025
US Marines boarding a helicopter. Photo: File photo.
By Maria Páez Victor – Aug 28, 2025
The USA has deployed two warships, an armed nuclear submarine and 4,500 troops to the Caribbean Sea. According to Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, their supposed mission is to combat drug trafficking and a drug cartel called “Cartel de los Soles” [Cartel of the Sun’s]. Rubio claims that it is led by President Maduro, and he insists that it is intent on “flooding” the US with narcotics. He stated that this cartel is one of the largest criminal organizations that exists in the hemisphere.
Military experts, however, point out that two warships and a nuclear submarine is overkill and ineffective to combat smugglers’ boats, for which helicopters and coast-guard-type ships would be more effective. Furthermore, as a potential invasion, 4,500 troops is woefully inadequate for invading a country the size of Venezuela. The US needed 26,000 troops to invade Panama, 110,000 to invade Afghanistan, and 130,000 to invade Iraq, all with very mixed results.
No drugs in Venezuela
Furthermore, drugs and this “cartel” are poorly concocted excuses to attack Venezuela. Washington has no evidence whatsoever of the existence of this criminal organization. Pino Arlacchi, Under-secretary General of the UN and Executive Director of the UN program against drugs UNODC, has categorically stated that: “the UN 2025 report dismantles piece by piece the geopolitical fabrication built about the ‘Cartel of the Suns,’ an entity as legendary as the Loch Ness Monster (1).”
In regards to Venezuela being a drug nation, that is also pure fantasy. The 2025 UN drug report states that the Venezuelan government’s fight against drugs has been exemplary, that 30 previous annual reports do not even mention Venezuelan drug trafficking because it does not exist, that most of the drugs that go north do so through the Pacific Ocean not the Caribbean Sea, and that only 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela. Arlacchi recently mentions that 57% of the banana containers leaving Ecuador and arriving in Europe are loaded with cocaine. Colombia produces more than 70% of the world’s cocaine; meanwhile, in Venezuela, there is no coca growing.
Even a 2020 report made by critics of the Venezuelan government, Geoff Ramsey and David Smilde from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), concluded that the country “is not a primary transit country for US-bound cocaine” and that the bulk of drug shipments reach US territory via Washington-allied countries in Central America.
The hypocrisy of Washington is appalling. The US imports, sells, buys, and consumes the most cocaine in the world. Its cities and towns are filled with addicts, and its drug-induced crime is at unbelievable levels. The US has the highest rate of drug overdose deaths in the world. Why not go after the US drug cartels and distributors?
There is no mistake: the warships are intended to threaten the Venezuelan government and create chaos and psychological terror in the population.
Mind games
Most people have not heard of this military deployment, unless they live in Miami, because the mainstream media has largely ignored it. Not so with social media, which has exploded with the news and prognostications of an imminent invasion of Venezuela, the seizure of its president (on whom the US has set a bounty on his head of $50 million!), and the fall of its government by military force. The Miami based ultra-right extremists have had a field day, building up psychological terror and touting what they wish but cannot assure.
World attention, however, has had other fish to fry: the Russia/Ukraine conflict, the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s tariff attacks on the world economy, and inside the USA, the elusive Epstein File, the military takeover of Washington DC, the attempts to rig electoral districts, and the continuing jailing and deporting of immigrants. Trump has quite an agenda already. To add Venezuela to it, he would have to kiss his desired Nobel Peace Prize goodbye if he attacked a Latin American country.
And that is exactly what Marco Rubio, with his sick, ruthless obsession against Cuba and Venezuela wants: to bring Venezuela to the top of Trump’s agenda. He thinks this would be the “making” of him, but more likely, which he does not realize, it will be his utter downfall.
Impacts of the military threat
It seems that in the US, nobody in the top political or military echelons plays chess. There does not seem to be any consideration when they make a move of what their opponent will do. In Venezuela, there were several responses to this military threat:
Taking the threat seriously; Venezuela quickly deployed its comprehensive defense shield, which is formidable. The country has the most powerful armed forces in Latin America, the only one capable of high-intensity conflict. Its military technology is cutting edge, Russian built, with a sophisticated, potent, air defense system having short, medium, and long-range capacity. The Venezuelan armed forces, therefore, took up defensive positions immediately for all the world to see.
There are 4.5 million people in the militias in Venezuela, which form part of the armed forces. These civilians have been trained, prepared, and armed. Last weekend, the government opened registration for anyone who wished to join the militias in defending their homeland, and the response of many thousands throughout the nation was overwhelming. The people, therefore, are armed, and are in close cooperation with its military.
There is a political unity never seen before. Venezuelans of every stripe are incensed at the US affront. In a country where the opposition rarely, if at all, praises the government, its diverse members have rallied around the government and unified in defense of the nation. President Maduro’s political situation has been strengthened in an extraordinary manner.
International support for Venezuela
Perhaps because Trump has fired his top military intelligence officer, the US has misread the Latin American geopolitical situation badly: it can no longer claim Latin America as its back yard. Venezuela is not confronting this threat alone.
Washington does not appear to realize that times have changed. It is truly a multipolar world; the US cannot lord it over Latin America as it used to. This is a different world from the time when the US could berate, intimidate, bribe, harass, carry out assassinations, depose governments, and invade Latin American countries as it did before.
Russia and China, both with substantial investments in Venezuela, have told Washington quite clearly to stop threatening Venezuela, saying that the US does not “own” the Caribbean. Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Belarus, Iran, Brazil, and Turkey are some of the nations that have stated their support for Venezuela. Three significant supports are worth mentioning:
The Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has categorically denounced the illegality of the US military presence and threat, saying: “We are never going to support the intervention by a foreign government in a sovereign country.”
The BRIC nations, the new geopolitical organization that has more than half the world in its axis, has backed Venezuela.
The Colombian president Gustavo Petro has announced that, “if Venezuela is attacked, the armed forces of Colombia will unite with the Venezuelan army to fight the invaders.” This unity of armies has not happened since the time of Simón Bolívar in the 19th Century, when the Venezuelan and Colombian armies were one, and together they liberated the continent of the Spanish empire. These were historic and profound words of President Petro. The combined armies would be formidable indeed against a US invasion.
Throughout years of continuous attacks and sanctions, Venezuela has carried out an exemplary diplomatic effort that has paid off. The majority of UN members have regularly supported Venezuela, and stronger links to China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran—other sanctioned nations—have also been a source of support and solidarity.
Venezuelans will no doubt be bolstering their hopes remembering the triumphs of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and the Afghani and Vietnamese peasantry who withstood attacks, saving their respective countries. But wars exact great costs and loss of life, so it is best to avoid them altogether. Maybe one was averted in these days because Venezuela has followed the saying of the Roman, Vegetius: “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, prepare for war). Venezuela was and is prepared to face the invaders.
Venezuela has never attacked or threatened any other nation. It has never gone to war against any neighbour. It has always striven for peace for its land and people. President Maduro in his call for national unity said: “It is time for courage, for uniting efforts, and for putting aside minor differences, to speak with one voice, the voice of the homeland.” Venezuelans have heeded his words.
Notes
1.“The Great Deception Against Venezuela: Oil Geopolitics Disguised as War on Drugs” by Pino Arlacchi.
https://orinocotribune.com/a-funny-thin ... hat-wasnt/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
Venezuelans Enlist in Bolivarian Militia Amid US Intervention Threats
August 30, 2025
Venezuelans join the Bolivarian Militia enlistment drive against US invasion threats, August 29, 2025. Photo: AVN.
Venezuelans flocked to various designated points across the country to enlist in the ranks of the Bolivarian Militia this Friday, August 29, and Saturday, August 30, nationwide.
Since early hours on Friday, young people, workers, and various sectors of the country have enlisted with joy and patriotism to commit to joining in the defense of national sovereignty.
The majority of attendees express their firm repudiation of US invasion threats and the destabilization narratives promoted by the far right through their media campaigns.
For this new enlistment drive, the Bolivarian Militia set up approximately a thousand points in the Bolívar squares and other emblematic spaces in cities throughout the country as part of the National Plan for Sovereignty and Peace, with the support of regional leaders, military authorities, and community organizations.
CNE: People’s will must be respected
The members of the National Electoral Council (CNE) joined the Simón Bolívar National Plan for Sovereignty and Peace at the Bolívar Square in Caracas.
The president of the National Electoral Council, Elvis Amoroso, said, “We are in the streets, firmly demonstrating that the will of the Venezuelan people must be respected.”
“We are building peace in democracy, but we must be vigilant in all circumstances to defend our country, its territorial integrity, and all that we inherited from our liberators,” he added.
CNE Vice President Carlos Quintero said that the Venezuelan people are sending a message of unity to guarantee the integrity of Venezuela.
He called on all Venezuelans to unite in efforts for peace.
40 enlistment centers set up in Caracas
The mayor of Caracas, Carmen Meléndez, announced that 40 enlistment centers have been set up across the 22 parishes of the capital city, and that they are all crowded with Venezuelans who are joining voluntarily to ensure the defense of the homeland.
Among the 40 enlistment centers are the Cuartel de la Montaña, the Bolivarian National Guard in El Paraíso, the Plaza Bolívar de Coche, El Valle, and 23 de Enero.
At the enlistment center in the Bolívar Square in the Cathedral parish, Meléndez said that this event represents “a celebration for the defense of the homeland.”
She urged all citizens to participate in the enlistment drive. “Come get prepared for the homeland, for Venezuela, for peace, sovereignty, and independence,” she said.
“We are free, sovereign, and independent. In these moments of threats and aggression from the empire, we tell the world that here we are, all of us who love the homeland, irrespective of political color, Venezuela is respected and defended,” she stated.
Meléndez highlighted the attendance and commitment that the Venezuelan people have shown at the enlistment points in defense of love and respect for their country.
“We are preparing under the tricolor of Venezuela, one flag for all,” said the mayor of Caracas.
Venezuelans join militia enlistment drive.
Ministry of Agriculture prepares in defense of the homeland
The minister of Productive Agriculture and Lands, Julio León Heredia, participated with the workers of his ministry at the enlistment center in Bolívar Square, Caracas.
Heredia reported that over 1,500 workers from his institution have enlisted in the second round of the enlistment drive.
He added that producers and farmers play a fundamental role in the economic, productive, and historical development of the nation.
National electricity supplier joins enlistment drive in Chacao
The workers of the National Electric Corporation (CORPOELEC) reaffirmed their commitment to territorial defense, joining the great mobilization of the Bolivarian Militia.
At the Bolívar Square in Chacao, in the state of Miranda, CORPOELEC workers joined the enlistment in response to external threats against the peace and sovereignty of Venezuela.
According to Jacinto Montilla, representative of the Productive Councils of Workers of CORPOELEC in the Altos Mirandinos, getting prepared in the militia is a patriotic commitment.
“I prepare myself because there is a need for our country to strengthen and move forward. I prepare and support our commander and president Nicolás Maduro, because he is at the helm, steering our country,” he said.
María Vernieri, head of the Training Coordination Division of CORPOELEC, stated that enlisting “is a historical commitment we Venezuelans have. Today, the homeland is threatened by imperialism, and for that reason, we are willing to defend our homeland for life, for family. Venezuela deserves respect.”
Presidential guard calls upon the nation to defend the homeland
Members of the Presidential Honor Guard called upon the nation “to join this democratic process in defense of the homeland of Bolívar.”
Marcela Ojeda, member of the Presidential Honor Guard, invited everyone, and especially women soldiers, to join this great patriotic celebration. “Get ready, it is not just about defending a territory, it is about defending our home, our community, our neighborhoods, our relatives, children, and grandchildren. Come and get ready,” she stated.
Members of the Presidential Honor Guard Brigade of Caracas emphasized their readiness for any eventuality that might put the country and the Venezuelan people at risk.
People in Sucre enlist massively
The inhabitants of the 22 parishes of Caracas went to the registration points set up for enlistment in the Bolivarian Militia.
In the Sucre parish, community leader Mirla Martínez reported that the participation has been remarkable.
“We are at the forefront, ready for whatever comes. We have faced many problems, the blockade, the economic war. We continue to resist,” she expressed.
Mirla Martínez said that she is responding to the president’s call. “We are in the fight and we are not going to back down,” she added.
Mariana Contreras, a community member, said, “Venezuela is free and sovereign.”
ALBA-TCP executive secretary: the people are mobilized
The executive secretary of ALBA-TPC and deputy minister for Latin America of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Rander Peña, also responded to the call for readiness, accompanied by the ministry’s workers.
At the enlistment center in Cathedral parish, he highlighted that the people are mobilized to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
“We have formed a body of fighters, joining what has been a Bolivarian, patriotic call,” he said. “The threat to peace in Venezuela and Latin America is a reality, and the peoples of the world have seen this. We have had weeks where movements of solidarity, political parties, and various expressions of solidarity have manifested in support of peace and the Bolivarian project.”
He repudiated the statements made by US Attorney General Pam Bondi, putting a price on President Nicolás Maduro’s head, as well as the unfounded claims of the US government linking the head of the Venezuelan state to drug trafficking.
“The US has announced a military deployment,” he pointed out. “It is not possible for nuclear submarines to bring peace to a region that has declared itself a zone of peace. It is not true that a nuclear submarine intends to combat drug trafficking. It is disproportionate, and our people know that. It is like sending a Sukhoi to stop a robbery at a street corner. No one believes it, but this is the façade that they created to try to intimidate the Venezuelan people.”
He said that Venezuela has received global solidarity, and a major event is to take place in several cities around the world in support of Venezuela and its government on Saturday, August 30.
He called on all sectors of the country to join the event under the slogan: “Venezuela is not a threat, it is a hope.”
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelans- ... n-threats/
Day of Solidarity With Venezuela Against US Interventionism Celebrated Around the World
August 31, 2025
Demonstration in Mexico City in solidarity with Venezuela against US invasion threats. Photo: Telegram/Campaña Venezuela no es Amenaza.
The Global Day of Solidarity with Venezuela and for Peace in Latin America and the Caribbean was held in locations around the world. On Saturday, August 30, mass organizations, political parties, and social movements from various countries united under the slogan “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope” to express their support for Venezuela and peace in Latin America.
The solidarity event comes in response to the recent interventionist actions and threats by the United States Government against the Venezuelan people and government, which include the deployment of military vessels in the Caribbean Sea as an excuse for intervention and destabilization, as well as the increase of a bounty on President Nicolás Maduro’s head, whom the US falsely accuses of association with drug trafficking.
#ENVIDEO | Jornada de solidaridad con #Venezuela
desde #Brasilia, #Brazil 
. pic.twitter.com/wx0BMdNcIa
— teleSUR TV (@teleSURtv) August 30, 2025
With the slogan “Hands off Venezuela!” resonating strongly from South Africa to Australia, events were held in locations around the world such as the United Kingdom, Serbia, Malaysia, Colombia, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Austria, Bolivia, South Korea, Brazil, Equatorial Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Senegal, and others.
The activities took place in public squares, embassies, universities, and cultural spaces, and included mobilizations, gatherings, forums, artistic expressions, and solidarity statements.
País Vasco joins global solidarity in defense of Venezuela
Plaza Venezuela in Bilbao became the epicenter of internationalist solidarity on Saturday, with a massive gathering as part of the Global Day of Solidarity with Venezuela. The event, responding to the military threats from the US, featured Venezuelan Consul Glenna del Valle Cabello and Basque organizations, who condemned the hybrid war against the Venezuelan people.
Spain: Madrid raises its voice against US military threats
Social and political organizations gathered in front of the Venezuelan Consulate in Madrid under the slogan “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope,” repudiating the US military deployment near Venezuelan coasts.
The protesters expressed solidarity with the government of President Nicolás Maduro and warned about the risk of an interventionist escalation disguised as anti-drug operations.
The protesters highlighted that Washington’s accusations lack legal basis and contradict international reports certifying Venezuela’s anti-drug cooperation. They also demanded the immediate cessation of economic sanctions and respect for Venezuelan sovereignty.
Romania condemns US interventionism against Venezuela
Organizations in solidarity with Venezuela in Romania held a gathering in the city of Bucharest, condemning the actions of the United States against Venezuela and the false accusations against President Nicolás Maduro.
Italian communists express support for self-determination of the Venezuelan people
The Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity among the Peoples, along with other solidarity organizations, participated on Saturday morning in a mobilization near the Colosseum in Rome as part of the global campaign “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is hope.”
The mobilization expressed a resounding condemnation of imperialist aggression, economic sanctions, and the hybrid war that have plagued the Bolivarian Revolution for years, and reaffirmed the Venezuelan people’s right to sovereignty, peace, and self-determination.
Communist Party of Austria holds event in solidarity with Venezuela
The Communist Party of Austria held an event in solidarity with Venezuela on Saturday, in the capital, Vienna.
La voz del pueblo se hace escuchar, desde Austria el Pueblo rechaza los actos de injerencia extranjera de Estados Unidos contra Venezuela y reafirman todo su apoyo al pueblo Venezolano
#VenezuelaWeAreHope#VenezuelaIsNotAThreat pic.twitter.com/iT2ukXqJJi
— Raúl Giménez Paiva (@raul_gimenez10) August 30, 2025
Demonstration in Medellín, Colombia in support of Venezuela
The historic Pablo Tobón Uribe Theater in Medellín became the epicenter of solidarity with Venezuela on Saturday, where social movements and Colombian leaders reaffirmed their support for Venezuela against threats of US intervention. Tricolor flags and slogans for peace flooded the scene with a unanimous premise: “The struggle of Venezuela is ours.”
Antifascist International of St. Lucia: US is the real threat, not Maduro
The Antifascist International of Saint Lucia condemned the US military deployment in Caribbean waters, labeling it as “covert aggression against Venezuela.” It pointed out that the anti-drug operation is a pretext to attack Venezuelan sovereignty, and highlighted that international bodies certify Venezuela’s anti-drug policies.
The organization emphasized that Venezuela is a historical partner of the Caribbean through initiatives like PetroCaribe, and demanded that the region’s character as a Zone of Peace be maintained. The statement concludes by supporting the Bolivarian Revolution and condemning the actions of the US and Israel against sovereign peoples.
Events held throughout Cuba in condemnation of US threats against Venezuela
At the headquarters of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) and the Cuba chapter of Antifascist International, acts of solidarity with Venezuela were held, repudiating the US threats against Venezuela and the entire region.
Como en todas las provincias de Cuba y muchos países del mundo, se efectuó acto de apoyo a Venezuela, en defensa de la paz de América Latina y el Caribe. Voces y cantos de solidaridad, paz y amor se unieron en un todo, por nuestros pueblos. #CubaConVenezuela #ElMundoConVenezuela pic.twitter.com/tasidQifSi
— Inés María Chapman Waugh (@InesMChapman) August 30, 2025
Dominican Republic exhorts the UN to act against US interventionism
Dominicans belonging to the country’s Antifascist International demanded that the UN and its Security Council act against the interventionist and hegemonic actions of the United States.
They also urged the Dominican government and the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to raise their voices in defense of peace, unity, and the independence of the region.
URNG-MAÍZ of Guatemala expresses support for Venezuela’s battle against imperialism
The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Party (URNG-MAÍZ) highlighted in a statement the interventionism of US imperialism in the sovereign nations of Latin America, from the imposition of foreign monopolies, the overthrow of the Revolutionary Government of Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala (1954), and the counter-revolution financed from abroad, to the liberalism that today perpetuates corruption and dispossession.
In this regard, the Executive Committee of URNG-MAÍZ expressed its full internationalist solidarity with the brave people of Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution, and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
Demonstrations in Mexico in solidarity with Venezuela
At the Simón Bolívar Monument in Mexico City, protesters held Venezuelan flags and chanted slogans like “Stop Trump’s aggression against Venezuela!” and “Long live the self-determination of peoples!”
Burkina Faso condemns US interventionism
The Pan-Africanist Movement and the Burkina Faso chapter of the Antifascist International organized a mobilization in solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
Equatorial Guinea categorically condemns all forms of US intervention against Venezuela
Equatorial Guineans delivered a statement of solidarity to the Venezuelan Embassy in Malabo, in which they expressed their categorical repudiation against any form of intervention, economic and diplomatic blockade.
Namibian youth urge Global South to unite against imperialism
In a statement, Justina Lipumbu, secretary of the District Youth League of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) for Windhoek Rural, urged the Global South to unite against US imperialism.
She recounted that during her one-month stay in Venezuela, “I did not witness a threat to international peace and security, but a nation determined to chart its own course, free from external interference.”
“I saw a people, rich in culture and history who, like us, have fought long and hard for their right to self-determination,” she added. “A people that, despite the hardships imposed upon them, continue to resist, seeking a future defined by their own aspirations.”
Angolan activists highlight African peoples’ solidarity with Venezuela
The Executive General Secretariat of the Angolan Committee for Solidarity with Bolivarian Venezuela (CASOVEB) announced its participation in the International Antifascist Day – Angola to reaffirm its solidarity and support for the people and the constitutional government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, led by President Nicolás Maduro.
“Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope! A hope for a future of multipolarity, shared development, solidarity, and integration, where human dignity, peace, and the self-determination of peoples prevail,” adds the CASOVEB statement.
Venezuelan Influencer Goes Viral Again, Shows Normality and Nationalist Fervor Amid US Imperialist Threats
August 31, 2025
Venezuelan influencer and winner of the 2022 Venezuelan Journalist Prize (Twitter mention) Orlenys Ortiz. Photo: X/@OrlenysOV.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com) – Venezuelan influencer and National Journalism Award winner Orlenys Ortiz has gone viral again by showcasing national unity in the face of an unprecedented US imperialist threat, which has positioned eight war vessels in the Southern Caribbean near Venezuela’s borders.
In recent days, Ortiz has published videos and photos showing massive participation by Venezuelans enlisting in the Bolivarian Militia after a call by President Nicolás Maduro and other Chavista leaders.
As in the past, the journalist has become a target of right-wing attacks. In 2018 and 2019, she gained notoriety by showing normality amid crisis in a Venezuela besieged by economic war and sanctions and again in 2022 when Argentina—following US orders—seized a Boeing 747 cargo jet belonging to Venezuela. She has consistently demonstrated elements of Venezuelan life that the Western narrative refuses to portray.
Attacks from the far-right
For her posts, the influencer has received hate from far-right fanatics who seek to minimize her work.
“All those photos are lies,” “No one is enlisting in the Militia,” “Maduro is about to fall,” and misogynistic messages that demean her as a woman are some expressions of hate visible on her X account, which also has a presence on Telegram, Instagram and TikTok. A simple reading of the comments reveals the nature of those who oppose the Bolivarian Revolution, both in Venezuela and Latin America.
Dismantling false narratives
Many analysts, relying on false reports from Venezuelan far-right sources, have spread rumors about a potential split within the Bolivarian Armed Forces due to the threat of US military action. However, the reality on the streets proves the contrary and demonstrates the solidity of President Maduro’s leadership.
Another point of recent attacks has been her work showing the normality of everyday Venezuelan life, its supermarkets, shopping centers and the country’s economic recovery.
Even the far-right Argentine publication El Clarín wrote about her in 2022 for her work breaking down the theft of the Boeing 747 from the Venezuelan company EMTRASUR by the Argentine judiciary and US imperialism.
Many analysts believe it is essential to promote communicators of this caliber, who simply defend their country and the cause they believe in: Chavismo.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelan-i ... t-threats/
August 30, 2025
Venezuelans join the Bolivarian Militia enlistment drive against US invasion threats, August 29, 2025. Photo: AVN.
Venezuelans flocked to various designated points across the country to enlist in the ranks of the Bolivarian Militia this Friday, August 29, and Saturday, August 30, nationwide.
Since early hours on Friday, young people, workers, and various sectors of the country have enlisted with joy and patriotism to commit to joining in the defense of national sovereignty.
The majority of attendees express their firm repudiation of US invasion threats and the destabilization narratives promoted by the far right through their media campaigns.
For this new enlistment drive, the Bolivarian Militia set up approximately a thousand points in the Bolívar squares and other emblematic spaces in cities throughout the country as part of the National Plan for Sovereignty and Peace, with the support of regional leaders, military authorities, and community organizations.
CNE: People’s will must be respected
The members of the National Electoral Council (CNE) joined the Simón Bolívar National Plan for Sovereignty and Peace at the Bolívar Square in Caracas.
The president of the National Electoral Council, Elvis Amoroso, said, “We are in the streets, firmly demonstrating that the will of the Venezuelan people must be respected.”
“We are building peace in democracy, but we must be vigilant in all circumstances to defend our country, its territorial integrity, and all that we inherited from our liberators,” he added.
CNE Vice President Carlos Quintero said that the Venezuelan people are sending a message of unity to guarantee the integrity of Venezuela.
He called on all Venezuelans to unite in efforts for peace.
40 enlistment centers set up in Caracas
The mayor of Caracas, Carmen Meléndez, announced that 40 enlistment centers have been set up across the 22 parishes of the capital city, and that they are all crowded with Venezuelans who are joining voluntarily to ensure the defense of the homeland.
Among the 40 enlistment centers are the Cuartel de la Montaña, the Bolivarian National Guard in El Paraíso, the Plaza Bolívar de Coche, El Valle, and 23 de Enero.
At the enlistment center in the Bolívar Square in the Cathedral parish, Meléndez said that this event represents “a celebration for the defense of the homeland.”
She urged all citizens to participate in the enlistment drive. “Come get prepared for the homeland, for Venezuela, for peace, sovereignty, and independence,” she said.
“We are free, sovereign, and independent. In these moments of threats and aggression from the empire, we tell the world that here we are, all of us who love the homeland, irrespective of political color, Venezuela is respected and defended,” she stated.
Meléndez highlighted the attendance and commitment that the Venezuelan people have shown at the enlistment points in defense of love and respect for their country.
“We are preparing under the tricolor of Venezuela, one flag for all,” said the mayor of Caracas.
Venezuelans join militia enlistment drive.
Ministry of Agriculture prepares in defense of the homeland
The minister of Productive Agriculture and Lands, Julio León Heredia, participated with the workers of his ministry at the enlistment center in Bolívar Square, Caracas.
Heredia reported that over 1,500 workers from his institution have enlisted in the second round of the enlistment drive.
He added that producers and farmers play a fundamental role in the economic, productive, and historical development of the nation.
National electricity supplier joins enlistment drive in Chacao
The workers of the National Electric Corporation (CORPOELEC) reaffirmed their commitment to territorial defense, joining the great mobilization of the Bolivarian Militia.
At the Bolívar Square in Chacao, in the state of Miranda, CORPOELEC workers joined the enlistment in response to external threats against the peace and sovereignty of Venezuela.
According to Jacinto Montilla, representative of the Productive Councils of Workers of CORPOELEC in the Altos Mirandinos, getting prepared in the militia is a patriotic commitment.
“I prepare myself because there is a need for our country to strengthen and move forward. I prepare and support our commander and president Nicolás Maduro, because he is at the helm, steering our country,” he said.
María Vernieri, head of the Training Coordination Division of CORPOELEC, stated that enlisting “is a historical commitment we Venezuelans have. Today, the homeland is threatened by imperialism, and for that reason, we are willing to defend our homeland for life, for family. Venezuela deserves respect.”
Presidential guard calls upon the nation to defend the homeland
Members of the Presidential Honor Guard called upon the nation “to join this democratic process in defense of the homeland of Bolívar.”
Marcela Ojeda, member of the Presidential Honor Guard, invited everyone, and especially women soldiers, to join this great patriotic celebration. “Get ready, it is not just about defending a territory, it is about defending our home, our community, our neighborhoods, our relatives, children, and grandchildren. Come and get ready,” she stated.
Members of the Presidential Honor Guard Brigade of Caracas emphasized their readiness for any eventuality that might put the country and the Venezuelan people at risk.
People in Sucre enlist massively
The inhabitants of the 22 parishes of Caracas went to the registration points set up for enlistment in the Bolivarian Militia.
In the Sucre parish, community leader Mirla Martínez reported that the participation has been remarkable.
“We are at the forefront, ready for whatever comes. We have faced many problems, the blockade, the economic war. We continue to resist,” she expressed.
Mirla Martínez said that she is responding to the president’s call. “We are in the fight and we are not going to back down,” she added.
Mariana Contreras, a community member, said, “Venezuela is free and sovereign.”
ALBA-TCP executive secretary: the people are mobilized
The executive secretary of ALBA-TPC and deputy minister for Latin America of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Rander Peña, also responded to the call for readiness, accompanied by the ministry’s workers.
At the enlistment center in Cathedral parish, he highlighted that the people are mobilized to protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity.
“We have formed a body of fighters, joining what has been a Bolivarian, patriotic call,” he said. “The threat to peace in Venezuela and Latin America is a reality, and the peoples of the world have seen this. We have had weeks where movements of solidarity, political parties, and various expressions of solidarity have manifested in support of peace and the Bolivarian project.”
He repudiated the statements made by US Attorney General Pam Bondi, putting a price on President Nicolás Maduro’s head, as well as the unfounded claims of the US government linking the head of the Venezuelan state to drug trafficking.
“The US has announced a military deployment,” he pointed out. “It is not possible for nuclear submarines to bring peace to a region that has declared itself a zone of peace. It is not true that a nuclear submarine intends to combat drug trafficking. It is disproportionate, and our people know that. It is like sending a Sukhoi to stop a robbery at a street corner. No one believes it, but this is the façade that they created to try to intimidate the Venezuelan people.”
He said that Venezuela has received global solidarity, and a major event is to take place in several cities around the world in support of Venezuela and its government on Saturday, August 30.
He called on all sectors of the country to join the event under the slogan: “Venezuela is not a threat, it is a hope.”
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelans- ... n-threats/
Day of Solidarity With Venezuela Against US Interventionism Celebrated Around the World
August 31, 2025
Demonstration in Mexico City in solidarity with Venezuela against US invasion threats. Photo: Telegram/Campaña Venezuela no es Amenaza.
The Global Day of Solidarity with Venezuela and for Peace in Latin America and the Caribbean was held in locations around the world. On Saturday, August 30, mass organizations, political parties, and social movements from various countries united under the slogan “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope” to express their support for Venezuela and peace in Latin America.
The solidarity event comes in response to the recent interventionist actions and threats by the United States Government against the Venezuelan people and government, which include the deployment of military vessels in the Caribbean Sea as an excuse for intervention and destabilization, as well as the increase of a bounty on President Nicolás Maduro’s head, whom the US falsely accuses of association with drug trafficking.
#ENVIDEO | Jornada de solidaridad con #Venezuela
desde #Brasilia, #Brazil 
. pic.twitter.com/wx0BMdNcIa— teleSUR TV (@teleSURtv) August 30, 2025
With the slogan “Hands off Venezuela!” resonating strongly from South Africa to Australia, events were held in locations around the world such as the United Kingdom, Serbia, Malaysia, Colombia, Mexico, Azerbaijan, Austria, Bolivia, South Korea, Brazil, Equatorial Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Senegal, and others.
The activities took place in public squares, embassies, universities, and cultural spaces, and included mobilizations, gatherings, forums, artistic expressions, and solidarity statements.
País Vasco joins global solidarity in defense of Venezuela
Plaza Venezuela in Bilbao became the epicenter of internationalist solidarity on Saturday, with a massive gathering as part of the Global Day of Solidarity with Venezuela. The event, responding to the military threats from the US, featured Venezuelan Consul Glenna del Valle Cabello and Basque organizations, who condemned the hybrid war against the Venezuelan people.
Spain: Madrid raises its voice against US military threats
Social and political organizations gathered in front of the Venezuelan Consulate in Madrid under the slogan “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope,” repudiating the US military deployment near Venezuelan coasts.
The protesters expressed solidarity with the government of President Nicolás Maduro and warned about the risk of an interventionist escalation disguised as anti-drug operations.
The protesters highlighted that Washington’s accusations lack legal basis and contradict international reports certifying Venezuela’s anti-drug cooperation. They also demanded the immediate cessation of economic sanctions and respect for Venezuelan sovereignty.
Romania condemns US interventionism against Venezuela
Organizations in solidarity with Venezuela in Romania held a gathering in the city of Bucharest, condemning the actions of the United States against Venezuela and the false accusations against President Nicolás Maduro.
Italian communists express support for self-determination of the Venezuelan people
The Simón Bolívar Institute for Peace and Solidarity among the Peoples, along with other solidarity organizations, participated on Saturday morning in a mobilization near the Colosseum in Rome as part of the global campaign “Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is hope.”
The mobilization expressed a resounding condemnation of imperialist aggression, economic sanctions, and the hybrid war that have plagued the Bolivarian Revolution for years, and reaffirmed the Venezuelan people’s right to sovereignty, peace, and self-determination.
Communist Party of Austria holds event in solidarity with Venezuela
The Communist Party of Austria held an event in solidarity with Venezuela on Saturday, in the capital, Vienna.
La voz del pueblo se hace escuchar, desde Austria el Pueblo rechaza los actos de injerencia extranjera de Estados Unidos contra Venezuela y reafirman todo su apoyo al pueblo Venezolano
#VenezuelaWeAreHope#VenezuelaIsNotAThreat pic.twitter.com/iT2ukXqJJi— Raúl Giménez Paiva (@raul_gimenez10) August 30, 2025
Demonstration in Medellín, Colombia in support of Venezuela
The historic Pablo Tobón Uribe Theater in Medellín became the epicenter of solidarity with Venezuela on Saturday, where social movements and Colombian leaders reaffirmed their support for Venezuela against threats of US intervention. Tricolor flags and slogans for peace flooded the scene with a unanimous premise: “The struggle of Venezuela is ours.”
Antifascist International of St. Lucia: US is the real threat, not Maduro
The Antifascist International of Saint Lucia condemned the US military deployment in Caribbean waters, labeling it as “covert aggression against Venezuela.” It pointed out that the anti-drug operation is a pretext to attack Venezuelan sovereignty, and highlighted that international bodies certify Venezuela’s anti-drug policies.
The organization emphasized that Venezuela is a historical partner of the Caribbean through initiatives like PetroCaribe, and demanded that the region’s character as a Zone of Peace be maintained. The statement concludes by supporting the Bolivarian Revolution and condemning the actions of the US and Israel against sovereign peoples.
Events held throughout Cuba in condemnation of US threats against Venezuela
At the headquarters of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) and the Cuba chapter of Antifascist International, acts of solidarity with Venezuela were held, repudiating the US threats against Venezuela and the entire region.
Como en todas las provincias de Cuba y muchos países del mundo, se efectuó acto de apoyo a Venezuela, en defensa de la paz de América Latina y el Caribe. Voces y cantos de solidaridad, paz y amor se unieron en un todo, por nuestros pueblos. #CubaConVenezuela #ElMundoConVenezuela pic.twitter.com/tasidQifSi
— Inés María Chapman Waugh (@InesMChapman) August 30, 2025
Dominican Republic exhorts the UN to act against US interventionism
Dominicans belonging to the country’s Antifascist International demanded that the UN and its Security Council act against the interventionist and hegemonic actions of the United States.
They also urged the Dominican government and the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean to raise their voices in defense of peace, unity, and the independence of the region.
URNG-MAÍZ of Guatemala expresses support for Venezuela’s battle against imperialism
The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Party (URNG-MAÍZ) highlighted in a statement the interventionism of US imperialism in the sovereign nations of Latin America, from the imposition of foreign monopolies, the overthrow of the Revolutionary Government of Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala (1954), and the counter-revolution financed from abroad, to the liberalism that today perpetuates corruption and dispossession.
In this regard, the Executive Committee of URNG-MAÍZ expressed its full internationalist solidarity with the brave people of Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution, and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).
Demonstrations in Mexico in solidarity with Venezuela
At the Simón Bolívar Monument in Mexico City, protesters held Venezuelan flags and chanted slogans like “Stop Trump’s aggression against Venezuela!” and “Long live the self-determination of peoples!”
Burkina Faso condemns US interventionism
The Pan-Africanist Movement and the Burkina Faso chapter of the Antifascist International organized a mobilization in solidarity with the Venezuelan people.
Equatorial Guinea categorically condemns all forms of US intervention against Venezuela
Equatorial Guineans delivered a statement of solidarity to the Venezuelan Embassy in Malabo, in which they expressed their categorical repudiation against any form of intervention, economic and diplomatic blockade.
Namibian youth urge Global South to unite against imperialism
In a statement, Justina Lipumbu, secretary of the District Youth League of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) for Windhoek Rural, urged the Global South to unite against US imperialism.
She recounted that during her one-month stay in Venezuela, “I did not witness a threat to international peace and security, but a nation determined to chart its own course, free from external interference.”
“I saw a people, rich in culture and history who, like us, have fought long and hard for their right to self-determination,” she added. “A people that, despite the hardships imposed upon them, continue to resist, seeking a future defined by their own aspirations.”
Angolan activists highlight African peoples’ solidarity with Venezuela
The Executive General Secretariat of the Angolan Committee for Solidarity with Bolivarian Venezuela (CASOVEB) announced its participation in the International Antifascist Day – Angola to reaffirm its solidarity and support for the people and the constitutional government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, led by President Nicolás Maduro.
“Venezuela is not a threat, Venezuela is a hope! A hope for a future of multipolarity, shared development, solidarity, and integration, where human dignity, peace, and the self-determination of peoples prevail,” adds the CASOVEB statement.
Venezuelan Influencer Goes Viral Again, Shows Normality and Nationalist Fervor Amid US Imperialist Threats
August 31, 2025
Venezuelan influencer and winner of the 2022 Venezuelan Journalist Prize (Twitter mention) Orlenys Ortiz. Photo: X/@OrlenysOV.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com) – Venezuelan influencer and National Journalism Award winner Orlenys Ortiz has gone viral again by showcasing national unity in the face of an unprecedented US imperialist threat, which has positioned eight war vessels in the Southern Caribbean near Venezuela’s borders.
In recent days, Ortiz has published videos and photos showing massive participation by Venezuelans enlisting in the Bolivarian Militia after a call by President Nicolás Maduro and other Chavista leaders.
As in the past, the journalist has become a target of right-wing attacks. In 2018 and 2019, she gained notoriety by showing normality amid crisis in a Venezuela besieged by economic war and sanctions and again in 2022 when Argentina—following US orders—seized a Boeing 747 cargo jet belonging to Venezuela. She has consistently demonstrated elements of Venezuelan life that the Western narrative refuses to portray.
Attacks from the far-right
For her posts, the influencer has received hate from far-right fanatics who seek to minimize her work.
“All those photos are lies,” “No one is enlisting in the Militia,” “Maduro is about to fall,” and misogynistic messages that demean her as a woman are some expressions of hate visible on her X account, which also has a presence on Telegram, Instagram and TikTok. A simple reading of the comments reveals the nature of those who oppose the Bolivarian Revolution, both in Venezuela and Latin America.
Dismantling false narratives
Many analysts, relying on false reports from Venezuelan far-right sources, have spread rumors about a potential split within the Bolivarian Armed Forces due to the threat of US military action. However, the reality on the streets proves the contrary and demonstrates the solidity of President Maduro’s leadership.
Another point of recent attacks has been her work showing the normality of everyday Venezuelan life, its supermarkets, shopping centers and the country’s economic recovery.
Even the far-right Argentine publication El Clarín wrote about her in 2022 for her work breaking down the theft of the Boeing 747 from the Venezuelan company EMTRASUR by the Argentine judiciary and US imperialism.
Many analysts believe it is essential to promote communicators of this caliber, who simply defend their country and the cause they believe in: Chavismo.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelan-i ... t-threats/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Venezuela
Guyana, Venezuela and the hackneyed false flag story
Sep 1, 2025 , 3:01 pm .
The Southern Command has set up camp in the Guyanese enclave (Photo: US Army Specialist Joshua Taeckens)
On August 31, Guyana attempted to stir up further tension by accusing Venezuela of an alleged attack on a ship carrying electoral officials and ballot boxes in undisclosed waters of the Essequibo.
The official version was disseminated by the police and the Guyanese Defence Force, although they never presented concrete evidence , because there were no coordinates, visual records or expert reports to support it.
Consequently, the complaint appears to be a fabricated operation , designed to generate an artificial climate of confrontation.
The Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) responded immediately, with Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López dismissing the accusation as another fake news promoted by Guyanese and Trinidadian mafias , while warning of a campaign of false positives aimed at opening a conflict front in the region.
He clarified that the Venezuelan military presence in the border area is strictly defensive and sovereign, and reiterated that Caracas will not lend itself to fabricated provocations to justify external aggression.
A pattern of false flag operations
Several similar attempts at false flag operations have already been recorded during 2025.
On February 18, Guyana reported an alleged attack on its troops on the banks of the Cuyuní River, also in the Venezuelan Essequibo region.
The Venezuelan government described this as a "vile setup" aimed at manipulating public opinion and covering up the systematic violations of international law by the Guyanese enclave.
Furthermore, in April, Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez warned of another maneuver in preparation: a simulated attack on an ExxonMobil platform in pending waters to be delimited.
This alleged attack would serve as a pretext to blame Venezuela and justify hostile actions. The accusation directly linked private actors such as the American mercenary Erik Prince and internal political sectors, highlighting the connection between corporate interests, opposition political actors, and Washington's agenda.
In fact, on April 7, President Nicolás Maduro warned about the preparation of a covert operation, coordinated by ExxonMobil and the government of Guyana, whose objective would be to stage an attack in disputed maritime zones.
These repeated attempts follow the classic playbook of false flag operations , which begin with covert actions that blame the adversary, historically used as justification for interventions, illegal sanctions, or wars.
In this case, Guyana appears to be the spearhead of a larger geopolitical structure, in which Washington and multinational corporations like ExxonMobil find fertile ground to advance their offensive.
It is worth noting that a common feature of these plots is the way in which the alleged attackers are labeled: "gang members" or associated with transnational crime.
This discourse connects with the US strategy of magnifying figures like the Aragua Train or rehashing the narrative of the Cartel of the Suns. Both media constructions, closer to Hollywood scripts than serious diagnoses, serve as devices to present Venezuela as a regional threat.
In this way, border incidents like the one in Cuyuní or the alleged attack in Venezuela's Essequibo , or now, in the midst of the election process in Georgetown, become useful pieces to justify Washington's national security agenda, which combines energy, military, and political interests.
The regime change agenda
The background to these provocations cannot be separated from the regime change agenda promoted by the United States against Venezuela.
Currently , serving in his dual role as Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio has signaled a intensification of that policy.
His visit to Guyana on March 27 consolidated Georgetown's position as a satellite state in the strategy against Caracas.
From there, Rubio outlined the roadmap for an offensive that combines sanctions, propaganda about organized crime, and covert false flag operations.
The script is familiar, as it aims to present Venezuela as the epicenter of drug trafficking and terrorism, to create conditions that justify new pressure measures or even military action .
The current strategy against Venezuela is the continuation of a policy of regime change that is recycled in different scenarios .
Today, media accusations are combined with criminal narratives such as the resurgence of the so-called Cartel of the Suns, in addition to false flag operations at the borders , as has just happened again in the Guyanese enclave.
All of these pieces function as a "flash moment," carefully crafted to inflate the perception of danger and force the Venezuelan issue into President Donald Trump's spotlight.
For decades, the United States has relied on anti-drug rhetoric and the label of terrorism as excuses to justify interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
What is presented today as the fight against transnational crime or terrorism is nothing more than a pantomime to cover up with " legitimacy " what is essentially still a plan for regime change.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/guya ... dera-falsa
Google Translator
*****
Venezuela Donates 6,100 Tons of Food to Cuba, Launches New ALBA-TCP Trade Route (+Solidarity vs Military Aggression)
September 1, 2025
Featured image: Reception ceremony of the Venezuelan ship Manuel Gual as it delivered aid for the Cuban people in Havana on Saturday, August 30, 2025. Photo: X/@BrunoRguezP.
XTelegramRedditWhatsAppLinkedInFacebookThreadsMessengerWeChatMastodonEmailPrintCopy LinkShare
The Venezuelan ship Manuel Gual, which departed from La Guaira state, arrived at the Mariel Special Development Zone in Havana, carrying 6,100 tons of donations in the form of food and various products. It was received by Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz.
Following its arrival, Cruz highlighted on social media the strategic and human value of this action amid the difficult economic circumstances facing the country.
The vessel’s arrival inaugurated the shipping and trade route between the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), which promotes economic exchange, food sovereignty, and national production.
According to information released by Venezuelan local news outlets, the Venezuelan ambassador to Cuba, Orlando Maneiro, emphasized at the welcoming ceremony that “this arrival represents the beginning of a new era in regional maritime transport, aimed at strengthening trade and opening a new chapter in the unity of our peoples.”
Meanwhile, Cuba’s First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment Carlos Luis Jorge noted that each route traveled by this ship honors the memory of the founders of ALBA-TCP and reaffirms the commitment to a more just and prosperous future for the region.
During the event, the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace was also reiterated, and the Cuban people’s rejection of the US military deployment in the Caribbean and the disinformation campaigns against Venezuela was expressed.
This shipment is part of a tribute to the centennial of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz and constitutes a concrete expression of the political will and cooperation among the ALBA-TCP member countries.
Cuba thankful
On Sunday, August 31, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez expressed his gratitude for the Venezuelan donation in a social media post.
“We thank the government and people of Venezuela for the donation of food, fertilizers, and seeds sent to Cuba, at the inauguration of the shipping and commercial route of the ALBA-TCP countries,” the top diplomat wrote.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan journalist Luigino Bracci highlighted the humanitarian approach of the Bolivarian Revolution for supporting its Cuban allies while itself facing an unprecedented threat from US imperialism.
“While Venezuela is harassed by gringo ships, these are the ships it sends to brother countries, countries that have also helped us in other moments,” Bracci wrote.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-do ... ggression/
Sep 1, 2025 , 3:01 pm .
The Southern Command has set up camp in the Guyanese enclave (Photo: US Army Specialist Joshua Taeckens)
On August 31, Guyana attempted to stir up further tension by accusing Venezuela of an alleged attack on a ship carrying electoral officials and ballot boxes in undisclosed waters of the Essequibo.
The official version was disseminated by the police and the Guyanese Defence Force, although they never presented concrete evidence , because there were no coordinates, visual records or expert reports to support it.
Consequently, the complaint appears to be a fabricated operation , designed to generate an artificial climate of confrontation.
The Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) responded immediately, with Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López dismissing the accusation as another fake news promoted by Guyanese and Trinidadian mafias , while warning of a campaign of false positives aimed at opening a conflict front in the region.
He clarified that the Venezuelan military presence in the border area is strictly defensive and sovereign, and reiterated that Caracas will not lend itself to fabricated provocations to justify external aggression.
A pattern of false flag operations
Several similar attempts at false flag operations have already been recorded during 2025.
On February 18, Guyana reported an alleged attack on its troops on the banks of the Cuyuní River, also in the Venezuelan Essequibo region.
The Venezuelan government described this as a "vile setup" aimed at manipulating public opinion and covering up the systematic violations of international law by the Guyanese enclave.
Furthermore, in April, Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez warned of another maneuver in preparation: a simulated attack on an ExxonMobil platform in pending waters to be delimited.
This alleged attack would serve as a pretext to blame Venezuela and justify hostile actions. The accusation directly linked private actors such as the American mercenary Erik Prince and internal political sectors, highlighting the connection between corporate interests, opposition political actors, and Washington's agenda.
In fact, on April 7, President Nicolás Maduro warned about the preparation of a covert operation, coordinated by ExxonMobil and the government of Guyana, whose objective would be to stage an attack in disputed maritime zones.
These repeated attempts follow the classic playbook of false flag operations , which begin with covert actions that blame the adversary, historically used as justification for interventions, illegal sanctions, or wars.
In this case, Guyana appears to be the spearhead of a larger geopolitical structure, in which Washington and multinational corporations like ExxonMobil find fertile ground to advance their offensive.
It is worth noting that a common feature of these plots is the way in which the alleged attackers are labeled: "gang members" or associated with transnational crime.
This discourse connects with the US strategy of magnifying figures like the Aragua Train or rehashing the narrative of the Cartel of the Suns. Both media constructions, closer to Hollywood scripts than serious diagnoses, serve as devices to present Venezuela as a regional threat.
In this way, border incidents like the one in Cuyuní or the alleged attack in Venezuela's Essequibo , or now, in the midst of the election process in Georgetown, become useful pieces to justify Washington's national security agenda, which combines energy, military, and political interests.
The regime change agenda
The background to these provocations cannot be separated from the regime change agenda promoted by the United States against Venezuela.
Currently , serving in his dual role as Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor, Marco Rubio has signaled a intensification of that policy.
His visit to Guyana on March 27 consolidated Georgetown's position as a satellite state in the strategy against Caracas.
From there, Rubio outlined the roadmap for an offensive that combines sanctions, propaganda about organized crime, and covert false flag operations.
The script is familiar, as it aims to present Venezuela as the epicenter of drug trafficking and terrorism, to create conditions that justify new pressure measures or even military action .
The current strategy against Venezuela is the continuation of a policy of regime change that is recycled in different scenarios .
Today, media accusations are combined with criminal narratives such as the resurgence of the so-called Cartel of the Suns, in addition to false flag operations at the borders , as has just happened again in the Guyanese enclave.
All of these pieces function as a "flash moment," carefully crafted to inflate the perception of danger and force the Venezuelan issue into President Donald Trump's spotlight.
For decades, the United States has relied on anti-drug rhetoric and the label of terrorism as excuses to justify interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
What is presented today as the fight against transnational crime or terrorism is nothing more than a pantomime to cover up with " legitimacy " what is essentially still a plan for regime change.
https://misionverdad.com/venezuela/guya ... dera-falsa
Google Translator
*****
Venezuela Donates 6,100 Tons of Food to Cuba, Launches New ALBA-TCP Trade Route (+Solidarity vs Military Aggression)
September 1, 2025
Featured image: Reception ceremony of the Venezuelan ship Manuel Gual as it delivered aid for the Cuban people in Havana on Saturday, August 30, 2025. Photo: X/@BrunoRguezP.
XTelegramRedditWhatsAppLinkedInFacebookThreadsMessengerWeChatMastodonEmailPrintCopy LinkShare
The Venezuelan ship Manuel Gual, which departed from La Guaira state, arrived at the Mariel Special Development Zone in Havana, carrying 6,100 tons of donations in the form of food and various products. It was received by Cuban Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz.
Following its arrival, Cruz highlighted on social media the strategic and human value of this action amid the difficult economic circumstances facing the country.
The vessel’s arrival inaugurated the shipping and trade route between the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), which promotes economic exchange, food sovereignty, and national production.
According to information released by Venezuelan local news outlets, the Venezuelan ambassador to Cuba, Orlando Maneiro, emphasized at the welcoming ceremony that “this arrival represents the beginning of a new era in regional maritime transport, aimed at strengthening trade and opening a new chapter in the unity of our peoples.”
Meanwhile, Cuba’s First Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment Carlos Luis Jorge noted that each route traveled by this ship honors the memory of the founders of ALBA-TCP and reaffirms the commitment to a more just and prosperous future for the region.
During the event, the proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace was also reiterated, and the Cuban people’s rejection of the US military deployment in the Caribbean and the disinformation campaigns against Venezuela was expressed.
This shipment is part of a tribute to the centennial of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz and constitutes a concrete expression of the political will and cooperation among the ALBA-TCP member countries.
Cuba thankful
On Sunday, August 31, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez expressed his gratitude for the Venezuelan donation in a social media post.
“We thank the government and people of Venezuela for the donation of food, fertilizers, and seeds sent to Cuba, at the inauguration of the shipping and commercial route of the ALBA-TCP countries,” the top diplomat wrote.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan journalist Luigino Bracci highlighted the humanitarian approach of the Bolivarian Revolution for supporting its Cuban allies while itself facing an unprecedented threat from US imperialism.
“While Venezuela is harassed by gringo ships, these are the ships it sends to brother countries, countries that have also helped us in other moments,” Bracci wrote.
https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-do ... ggression/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."