The U.S. military aggression against Venezuela is a leap forward in the imperialist offensive against Latin America. It is not just an attack on one country but a brutal warning to all peoples who defy Washington’s dictates. In the face of this neocolonial escalation, diplomatic condemnations and abstract calls for peace are not enough: a mass, internationalist, and class-based response is necessary. That is why the Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International (CPR-FI) and the La Izquierda Diario International Network, demand that trade union federations and social and political movements, beginning with those that have repudiated the attack, call for a strike all across the Americas of the working class. This will act as the centerpiece of an international mobilization capable of stopping imperialist aggression, expelling U.S. imperialism from Venezuela, and opening up mass struggle in all of Latin America.
Since the early hours of January 3, the world has been witnessing criminal aggression in the Americas with the U.S. military attack against Venezuela, a catastrophic turning point in the neocolonial offensive against Latin America. The Trump administration, in the name of “America First,” kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores and bombed Venezuelan territory, causing at least 80 deaths. This act of war and violation of sovereignty seeks to impose by force a new strategy for extractivist plunder, ensuring control of Venezuela’s strategic wealth and sending a threatening message to the entire region and beyond.
From the Permanent Revolution Current – Fourth International (CPR-FI), we raise our voice in the strongest protest against this imperialist aggression. Although we are left-wing and anti-imperialist opponents of the Venezuelan government, we demand the release of Maduro and Flores because the U.S. imperialist state and its justice system have no right to judge them. We unambiguously position ourselves in the military camp against U.S. imperialism, and we call for the mass mobilization of the international working class and the peoples of the world to defeat it. We do this without extending any political support to the Maduro government, now carried forward by Delcy Rodríguez — a profoundly anti-worker bourgeois administration that has shifted the burden of the economic crisis and sanctions onto working people while repressing labor and popular movements. This is a government that handed over national resources through pacts, concessions, and capitulation to capital and imperialism, thereby preparing the ground for this intervention. It is a government that, by engaging in electoral fraud and authoritarian methods, became the right wing’s most effective propaganda tool to discredit left-wing politics across the region, leaving behind a legacy that today weighs heavily against the possibility of mass anti-imperialist mobilization.
We maintain that the defeat of imperialism in Venezuela is of vital interest to the exploited and oppressed of the world, but we warn that defending the regime in the name of anti-imperialism implies politically disarming the people and confusing popular resistance with state repression.
Imperialism Without Disguise
The military operation launched by the United States against Venezuela is unprecedented in the recent history of the region. The pretext used — the supposed “fight against drug trafficking” and “narco-terrorism” — is nothing more than an old imperialist alibi, recycled over and over again to justify armed interventions, occupations, and coups. But now, the Trump administration has stripped them of any rhetorical veil, making it clear that it thinks of Venezuela as a territory to be administered by the United States, a vision reminiscent of the worst moments of the Monroe Doctrine.
In line with this, and emboldened by the colonial bombings in Venezuela, Trump went on to threaten countries such as Colombia, Mexico, and even Greenland, which Trump said should belong to the United States for reasons of “national security.” Trump also declared that Cuba “is about to fall,” linking its economic crisis to its dependence on Venezuelan oil. These statements, alongside the aggression against Venezuela, lay the groundwork for imperialist pressure and interventions. In the face of any attack, our position is clear: we defend Cuba against imperialism. Hands off Cuba! Stop the imperialist blockade and embargo! U.S. out of Guantanamo!
The United States is not seeking to combat drug trafficking, for which it is the world’s largest market. The attack on Venezuela aims to impose political control, enforce regional discipline, and secure privileged access to the country in order to plunder its common goods. The United States has the goal of displacing other powers such as Russia and China. This occurs in the context of the competition between the United States and China for Latin America. Venezuela’s enormous reserves of oil, minerals, rare earths, and its geopolitical location make it a central target. This is the real “transition” that seeks to turn the country into a large oil colony. Therefore, rejecting the incursion into Venezuela and combating U.S. imperialism is an immediate task for all, in particular in the United States and Latin America.
For their part, the European imperialist states endorsed Trump’s attack, more or less directly, while pointing out that “international law” must be respected. Trump’s threats regarding Greenland have set off alarm bells in the EU, whose international role is in decline amid disputes between the United States and China. They also want a share of the spoils of Venezuela’s and Latin America’s oil and resources, promoting the EU-Mercosur agreement in favor of their multinationals such as Repsol, BBVA, Total Energies, and others. That is why we are also fighting against European imperialism and its multinationals and for the return without compensation of the companies and resources plundered for decades in Latin America.
The Venezuelan Government after the Military Attack and Its Political Bankruptcy
Faced with this exceptional imperialist aggression, the Venezuelan government’s response lays bare its political and strategic bankruptcy. The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and the elevation of Delcy Rodríguez as the new executive not only reflect the gravity of the external attack and imperialist extortion, but also place the Venezuelan regime in a situation of extreme weakness. From a revolutionary perspective, it is essential to reject illusions in Maduro: the Venezuelan government has not only been hit by the force of imperialism, but also by the dead end to which its own political and strategic limitations have led it. Maduro, the government leadership, and the high command of the Armed Forces are responsible for having led the country into extreme vulnerability, politically disarming the masses in the face of an enemy that recognizes no limits or legalities.
In its early years, Chavismo developed an anti-imperialist rhetoric marked by open friction with U.S. imperialism. However, it never set out to break the country’s dependent capitalist structure. With the changes in international conditions, all that remained was a veneer of radicalism behind which the interests of foreign capital (debt repayment and new borrowing, authorization to take all profits generated in the country, almost total tax exemption for oil giants, delivery of mineral resources) and the local property-owning classes, both the traditional rich and the new bourgeoisie that emerged with Chavismo, were served. Venezuela was left with insufficient resources even for the most basic needs and burdened the working class and the poor with the dismantling of labor rights, the destruction of the bolivar, wages, and pensions, the total liberalization of prices, dollarization, and repression against the labor movement and popular discontent.
While making the working class bear the brunt of the crisis and, later, of imperialist sanctions, a ruling caste emerged, made up of high-ranking civilian and military bureaucrats who had become newly rich and increasingly lacked popular support. Besieged by the pro-imperialist opposition, the government responded by strengthening a repressive state apparatus, supported by the armed forces and police and paramilitary action as the axis of governance.
This orientation abandoned any prospect of social transformation and materially and politically eroded the popular base. By subordinating the labor movement to a strategy of capitalist governance, increasingly supported by private capital and repression, the government itself ended up disarming the people in the face of the neocolonial appetites of U.S. imperialism, leaving the country in the hands of a state apparatus incapable of resisting a direct offensive without the conscious and organized support of the masses.
This orientation undermined the effective capacity of working people to resist imperialist aggression. The result is a government that today fears the mobilized masses more than forced negotiations with imperialism. That is why, even under attack, it prioritizes the search for negotiated solutions, appeals to diplomatic mediation, and explores agreements, rather than calling for organized mass resistance from below. The official response has been reduced to formal statements, institutional-level denunciations, and repeated abstract calls for “peace,” while desperately attempting to rebuild channels of negotiation to such an extent that Delcy Rodríguez has offered, in a letter, an “invitation to the Trump government to work together on an agenda of cooperation.” The Madurista apparatus has shown no intention whatsoever of resisting imperialism.
This is the logical consequence of the authoritarian degeneration of Chavismo in power, which gradually abandoned the electoral legitimacy it enjoyed during the governments of Hugo Chávez, resorting to fraud, as happened in the last presidential elections. Another consequence of this drift was expressed in the mass migration of millions of Venezuelans. After years of managing a dependent capitalist state, co-opting and demobilizing grassroots organizations, persecuting the independent left, and deepening alliances with Russian, Chinese, and European capital — in addition to U.S. transnational corporations such as Chevron—the government has proven incapable of offering consistent resistance.
It prefers to surrender rather than unleash a mass resistance that would inevitably escape its control and threaten its interests. The Armed Forces, like any other bourgeois institution, are more concerned with their business and survival than with standing up for true national defense. They are not the “people in uniform” as they have so often boasted, but an organ of repression.
A Bourgeoisie that Serves Imperialism and Applaudes Their Executioner
Figures such as María Corina Machado are completely subservient to U.S. imperialism; they act as direct agents of a foreign power to massacre their own people. The response of the Latin American bourgeoisie to the aggression has been one of servant-like baseness. That is why one of the most repugnant aspects of this situation has been the reaction of broad sectors of the Latin American bourgeoisie and openly pro-imperialist governments. Presidents, foreign ministers, and the media celebrated the aggression, justified the intervention, or remained complicitly silent.
This blatant servility confirms a historical truth: the Latin American bourgeoisie is incapable of consistently defending national sovereignty because its interests are structurally linked to imperialist capital. While during the first half of the 20th century there were bourgeois governments such as those of Cárdenas in Mexico, Vargas in Brazil, and Perón during his first presidencies in Argentina, which partially confronted imperialist designs, the Latin American bourgeoisie, increasingly fearful of the regional labor movement after the rise of the 1960s and 1970s and with the changes in the world economy (neoliberal “globalization,” the weight of foreign debt, privatizations, etc.), have deepened their role as partners in the plundering of their own peoples.
Right-wing governments such as Milei’s in Argentina and others in the region have openly supported the military attack. These native bourgeoisies, junior partners of imperialist capital, see submission to Washington as a guarantee to crush their own working classes and exploit national resources more fiercely. Their role is that of local gendarmes of plunder.
But we also denounce the impotence of the “progressive” governments in the region, such as Lula or Scheinbaum, who have been negotiating the terms of submission to Trump and now limit themselves to lukewarm statements while Trump attacks Venezuela militarily and threatens several countries in the region. In Lula’s case, his criticism of military intervention does not even mention Trump and the United States, beyond not calling for any action against the U.S. blockade in the Caribbean Sea, all in order to maintain good relations with Washington. The policy of these “progressive” governments is nothing more than a capitulation in stages that will only allow the consolidation of the new U.S.offensive in the region, which, sooner or later, will turn against them. Conciliatory policies toward Trump, such as Lula’s, are historically doomed to failure.
Internationalism in Action: Taking to the Streets Across the World and Solidarity From Below
In response to this imperialist military aggression, an international response has been growing, albeit still in its early stages, from sectors of the working class, youth, and movements around the world. In Latin America, the United States, Europe, and other regions, there have been mobilizations, demonstrations, statements, and campaigns denouncing the imperialist attack.
The openly reactionary nature of Maduro’s regime has been an obstacle to the development of a large mass mobilization against the first targeted and violent U.S. attack in decades in the region. That is why it is essential to rebuild a consistent anti-imperialist mobilization from an internationalist perspective with class independence, relying on the most advanced elements of the solidarity movement with Palestine that has moved and continues to move the world. From marches, student occupations, and flotillas, to general strikes such as those in Italy.
At the face of the attack on Venezuela, the La Izquierda Diario International Network and the CPR-FI have responded by calling for combative action in the streets. From Argentina to the Spanish State, from Mexico to France, from Brazil to Germany, including the United States, we have organized and actively participated in mobilizations, pickets, and assemblies to repudiate imperialist aggression. We have promoted united actions, coordination, and calls for mobilization, reaffirming a militant, not rhetorical, internationalism. This solidarity from below is a fundamental point of support in confronting the imperialist offensive. In the United States, from Left Voice, in the heart of the beast, we denounce that the enemy is at home and we demand:
Not a single dollar or bullet for the aggression against Venezuela! Hands off Venezuela and Latin America! Down with U.S. imperialism!
Behind the image of strength that Trump seeks to project in order to handle the decline of U.S. imperialism, lie the multiple crises of his government. Not only has he suffered electoral defeats at the end of 2025 and his domestic popularity continues to fall, but his own closest social base, expressed in the MAGA movement, is riddled with multiple and increasingly virulent divisions over domestic and foreign policy. But most importantly, millions are flooding the streets of the United States with “No Kings” mobilizations.
ICE raids against immigrants are encountering increasing resistance, as recently shown by the Los Angeles uprising, the resistance in Chicago, and now the protests against the murder of migrant rights activist Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis by an ICE officer.
All of us who fight against U.S. imperialism inside and outside the United States must be aware of the tremors that are occurring in the enemy’s ranks.
A mobilization across all the Americas is capable of defeating these new attempts of imperialist recolonization. What could the huge U.S. military do in the face of the strength of hundreds of millions of oppressed people on the continent led by the working class?
Trump and the Right Wing have to be defeated by a great bicontinental movement including social movements, the feminist movement, environmental movements, student organizations, indigenous movements. The large unions all across the Americas must rise up against Trump and imperialism, together with the millions mobilizing within the United States through the No Kings protests demanding Hands off Latin America, the millions of immigrants resisting ICE, the great anti-racist movement that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter rebellion, and the young people who have stood up against the genocide of the Palestinian people from universities, schools and workplaces.
We must come together so that the resistance spreads across the continent and we can stop this imperialist advance.
U.S. Imperialism out of Venezuela and Latin America! This is the concrete expression of our internationalism. We do not limit ourselves to statements: we go out to fight alongside the masses, promoting a working class response, independent and organized from below, as the only way to defeat imperialism and all its agents in the region.
Our Fight Against Imperialism Must be Independent From Maduro’s Government
The imperialist attack on Venezuela is, in reality, an attack on all exploited and oppressed people of the world, the prelude to new aggressions aimed at disciplining anyone opposing what Washington dictates. There is no possible solution within the margins of bourgeois states, pacts between elites, or palace diplomacy. Only the international unity of the working class and oppressed peoples, organized independently, can stop this advance and open up a truly emancipatory perspective.
That is why we call on workers’ organizations, unions, youth organizations, feminist organizations, and grassroots activists to promote mobilizations and actions of struggle in every country, without placing any illusions in so-called “progressive” bourgeois governments or military castes. The force capable of defeating imperialism lies solely in the conscious and independent mobilization of the oppressed of the world.
From the CPR-FI, we stand up in a clear and principled position: in the face of imperialist aggression, we are on the military side of Venezuela against the United States, without giving any political support to the bourgeois, authoritarian, and repressive government that runs the Venezuelan state. It is not by supporting such a regime that the sympathy and mobilization of the working class and oppressed of the hemisphere can be won for the anti-imperialist cause. Our task is to promote class independence of the working class, capable of confronting imperialism without subordinating itself to projects of class conciliation or alternative solutions within the capitalist order.
The aggression against Venezuela reaffirms a central lesson of revolutionary Marxism: there is no lasting national liberation within dependent capitalism. Real sovereignty can only be won by the working class and the oppressed, by taking power and reorganizing society on new foundations. In Latin America, this perspective takes concrete form in the struggle for a Federation of Socialist Republics of all Latin America, as a revolutionary alternative to imperialism, the local bourgeoisies, and their governments.
In the face of the imperialist attack on Venezuela, the CPR-FI raises an urgent and strategic program of action for the working class and the oppressed of Latin America and the world:
We demand that unions, social movements and the left, beginning with those that have repudiated the attack, call for a continental strike of the working class. The region must rise up and stop Trump’s advance with a continent-wide working class action. We call on unions throughout Latin America (CGT-CTA in Argentina, CUT in Brazil and Chile, etc.) to call national strikes with mobilizations in all countries that are part of a continental strike to stop the imperialist war machine against Venezuela.
We demand an immediate stop of military aggression! Port workers must refuse to ship the weapons that kill our Latin American siblings. We should shut everything down, from the transports to the factories in solidarity with Venezuela. The Italian working class recently set a great example, paralyzing the country against the genocide in Palestine and taking up the anti-colonial struggle. It is time to go further raising the anti-imperialist struggle with a continental strike.
We demand the freedom of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, kidnapped by imperialism. We do not recognize the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts to trial them; only the working people of Venezuela have that right.
We demand that the Venezuelan government grant full freedom to all imprisoned workers and protesters, annulling their convictions and trials. We demand the repeal of laws that criminalize social struggles. We demand full rights of assembly, organization, and demonstration for working people, women, and young people!
We fight for a self organized movement to fight the aggression against Venezuela, based on action committees in every country organized democratically by the rank and file of labor and social movements.
We unconditionally defend Venezuela’s sovereignty through workers’ and popular self-organization.
U.S. Imperialism out of Venezuela and Latin America! We demand an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops, ships, and aircraft and the dismantling of all foreign military bases on the continent.
We demand that we stop paying off the foreign debt! The working class and oppressed of Venezuela and our countries do not owe a penny for the debt that the oppressors incurred to plunder us.
Expropriation without compensation of all imperialist companies, starting with Chevron and all transnational oil, mining, and agribusiness corporations. All U.S.-owned companies on Latin American soil should be nationalized under workers’ control in response to the aggression.
We demand an end to all trade and security pacts and treaties with the United States (USMCA, Alliance for Prosperity, TIAR, etc.).
Experience shows that no national bourgeoisie is consistent in the anti-imperialist struggle. The only guarantee of liberation is for the working class to take power, through governments of workers and the oppressed.
We fight for a Federation of Socialist Republics of all Latin America and democratically plan for the economy to end poverty, dependence, environmental destruction, and capitalism.
Signed by the organizations that make up the Current for Permanent Revolution – Fourth International (CPR-FI), and supported by March to Socialism in South Korea, Rouge! in Belgium, Corriente Roja – Cuarta Internacional in the Spanish State, and What Is To Be Done? in Canada.
